IEEE ENGINEERING MANAGEMENT REVIEW
Surf's Up: Volume 29, Number 1, First Quarter 2001

Linda Kosmin Langford
IEEE EMS Board of Governors

Businesses striving to maximize customer support can profit by Internet exposure and leveraging. Multi-featured Web sites have emerged that focus on strategies and resources that boost customer relationship management. Several facilitate single-access solutions while hurdling a wide range of challenges. Methods suggested can be used to increase positive customer experiences across mainstream, niche, and brand-loyal market segments. Alliances continue to be forged in the customer support industry to explore Internet le tradeoffs and to fuel development and acceptance of standards for cooperative online information exchange. The following Web resources illustrate how Internet techniques help promote consumer service awareness, choices, and convenience.

Top7Business
http://Top7Business.com
This site and electronic magazine encourages the sharing of tips, taboos, and tactics for boosting businesses, energizing employees, and delivering customer-centric quality services. An essay is posted daily that emphasizes seven new strategies, which are useful for developing and enhancing se business acumen. Daily postings are then archived in publicly accessible files indexed by topical headings: attraction, innovation, leadership, management, marketing, negotiation, personnel, presentations, sales, vision, and wealth building/finances. Added-value features include links to literature quotations, philosophical sayings, and vocabulary boosters.

Internet Auction List
www.internetauctionlist.com
Online auctions continue to entice players in the electronic commerce arena. Most sites implement software with specialized features that enhance the interactive buying and selling experience for customers. This site provides information about specific online and live auctions. Brief abstracts accompany most listings, and hyperlinks speed. Internet access to auction company home pages, merchandise appraisal services, auctioneer referrals, and daily auction information newsletters.

Customer Support Consortium
http://www.serviceinnovation.org
This is a California-based nonprofit alliance, comprised of over 50 technology companies that shape a standardized future for the customer support industry. Current programs emphasize knowledge management strategies and cooperative information exchange. This site identifies solutions to problems associated with multivendor computer technologies, including development of acceptable standards. Also included are links to cogent essays, reports, and book reviews.

CRMXchange
http://www.crmxchange.com
This site provides information for contact centers and telemarketing professionals. It hosts online discussion forums about customer relationship management and call-center technology and archiving of relevant white papers and case studies. Industry event calendars are kept current. As a multifeatured portal, it facilitates Internet connectivity to relevant business and legal resources in the United States and abroad. For example, it features links to key associations that help support and advance consumer interests such as: American Marketing Association, Association of Direct Marketing Agencies, The Call Centre Association (UK), Canadian Marketing Association, Customer Care Institute, Mexican Association of Marketing, International Customer Service Association, and the International Quality and Productivity Center. Also, hyperlinks can be browsed for information about books, catalogs, directories, forms, guides, job sites, magazines, market research studies, newsgroups, and trade shows.

ENGINEERING MANAGEMENT REVIEW
A publication of the IEEE Engineering Management Society