In a way, small businesses have a built-in advantage over their larger competitors — customers may choose a small company precisely because they expect personalized service and better access to the people in charge of their account.

In the age of the Internet, however, even small businesses face challenges in staying close to customers. With only a modest Web presence, a small business can expand its customer base beyond the neighborhood, state or even country. Expanding geographies may also mean extending business hours to accommodate different time zones. Also, a small business now has a multitude of communications vehicles for reaching customers, including landline and wireless phones, e-mail, fax, Web sites, regular mail and direct mail, and, of course, in-person sales and service visits. Getting the right information into the right hands at the right time can become more challenging as communications become fragmented.

An e-business solution for CRM or Customer Care uses the Internet and associated technologies to gather and manage information, in turn to create more customer-driven products and services and to increase customer satisfaction.

Assess your customer care needs

There are a number of ways for a small business to implement an e-business solution that makes big improvements in customer relationships. One of the ways to crystallize your needs is to work through the following series of questions relating to customer expectations, competition, costs and growth.

Customer expectations

• How much do your customers know about the products and services you offer?
• Are your employees equipped with the information they need to understand your customers' preferences, needs, and interests?

Competition

• How effective are your marketing efforts compared to your competitors?
• Are you getting new products or services to market faster than your competition?
• Do you currently provide real-time information about customers to your sales force? If not, would real-time information help them beat the competition?

Costs

• Do your customers use the Internet?
• Do you have a cost-effective method of converting prospects into customers?
• Do you know how your customers prefer to be contacted?

Growth

• Are you prepared to support your customers if your customer base grows quickly?

Better results with less effort

What many small businesses find so eye opening about e-business is that it can both increase customer satisfaction and cut costs. For example, by using e-business you can empower customers to retrieve information on products, service and orders and reduce the burden on your staff. With ready access to information about customers, your sales organization can spend less time running around looking for the information they need to solve problems. This can enable your company to get more out of your sales force and help keep staffing needs from going through the roof.

Take the example of The Telluride Group, a 27-person IT outsourcing and systems-management company that improved customer relations and saved money time with its e-business strategy. When Telluride's consultants travel to a client site they are able to carry a current version of the company's customer support database, giving them access to the information they need. As consultants make updates, they can automatically synchronize with the central database whenever they connect to the Internet using a local-area network (LAN), virtual-private network (VPN) or wireless LAN (WLAN).

The company also has full, secure remote access to all client systems, which enables it to monitor clients and address 75% of all technical issues remotely. The service is provided more quickly and at about half the cost of conventional on-site systems. As a result, the firm is able to both keep its rates down and boost its profitability.

"None of this would be possible without the Internet, remote access, and all of the support information our staff use to help clients," says Telluride's president, Jeff Behrens. "They're not wasting time in cars or on activities that aren't productive."