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Some
Thoughts on Extranets
Article by John
S. Rhodes
Abstract
The purpose of this
article is to help you understand some business and design issues related to
extranets. This article will also get you thinking about the kinds of tools
you might offer to your customers.
About Extranets
An extranet is basically an intranet that is partially exposed to customers under strict
security. An extranet might also be thought of as a secure web site for a
specific customer. I don't think that applications with generic security should count.
Therefore, for the purpose of this article, I won't pay much attention to web applications or web content that is available to any
user without a username and password.
I would argue that the purpose of an intranet is to help customers do their
jobs. I would also suggest that extranets enable customers to more quickly
and effectively interact with your organization. In this way, extranets
include tools and content that facilitate customer relationship management
(i.e, CRM), where the customer is actually in charge. Think of extranets as a way of spilling your guts to your customers. The purpose is
to facilitate business by exposing your business logic and business data to
your customers. With an extranet, you are trying to give customers access to the data that you have on them
regarding the business you have done with them. They see what you see
about them; they know what you know about them.
Extranets give customers access to their own
data. While you own the data, and while it is in your backend system, you are
giving it to them so that they are better able to do business with you. The hope is that by giving
customers access to their own data, they will be able to do a lot more work without you. If they can get
their own invoices via the extranet, then that saves a call to your call center. If they don't call, then your
costs can be lower. Note that this kind of activity is generally more satisfying to customers than dealing with your
employees. This doesn't mean your employees stink or that they are rude and
useless. Instead, it is simply the fact that most people like
self-service. An extranet facilitates this activity, if you design it correctly.
The Pre-Plan
You must make sure that your back end
infrastructure is solid and secure. Make sure that you business logic makes sense,
and that the employees in your organization are ready to follow strict business rules.
An extranet opens up your business to your customers so they will begin to
learn how you really work. For this reason, I would suggest that you build
an intranet before you build an extranet. The logic is simple: If you don't know how to manage
your data and your tools behind the scenes, then you will not be able to manage them with customers.
Assuming that you are comfortable with the possibility of an extranet, I
would advise you to concentrate on a few things before you even start to develop a plan. You'll want to concentrate on getting your organization
prepared for a massive change. Employees need to realize that your
previously closed systems, data, and business rules are going to go in front of users.
Organizations are slow to realize that customers see their data differently than employees. Customers make small things large, and large
things small. Once information is available to customers, the game changes. Now you are much more responsible to
your customers. You are more of a partner than a supplier. The bottom line is that your organization must prepare itself. An
extranet forces you to be customer focused. The cultural changes that come
with an extranet are not trivial. If you can't handle the customer heat, stay out of the extranet kitchen.
The core part of the pre-plan
is to make sure that your business is prepared to deal with customers. As
basic as that sounds, it is fundamental to success. When your systems are
not exposed to customers, you can cut corners and fudge information. You can
hide behind a veil and there is nothing your customers can do. But, as soon
as you turn on your extranet, customers will start to call the shots. Be
prepared. Take care of your business before you tackle the technology.
Extranet Design Issues
There are many
design issues but I'll keep things simple. When building your extranet,
you need to decide how much of it is truly yours. For example, should you
build the interfaces and tools using your colors, fonts, and logos? How
far do you want to push your branding? Consider that an extranet is
built for specific customers. You could dynamically pull in their
logos and their colors. You could make them feel right at home. Since you
will probably be using a registration system to drive the security of the
extranet, you could pull information off of user profiles and truly
customize the interface down to the level of each user from each company.
What is the
value of personalization? Be sure you know the answer to this question
before you go off and go crazy on personalization. Understand your goals
and objectives, and understand what your customers want. Also keep in mind
that your sales staff might really like the idea of shoveling customized
information to specific customers. Your sales force could provide
customers, at the individual or organizational level, with personal
messages, targeted deals, and so forth. I caution you once again to
consider your customer, but do keep these various design and content
opportunities in mind.
A related design
issue is deciding how much secure and open information you want to mingle
together. For example, do you want to use your extranet to display just
secure information or do you want it to also link to external content as
well, that is open to all customers? If you keep it focused, you win and
you lose. You win because you can more easily integrate your applications
and the overall experience will probably be smoother. You lose because it
is very likely that there is good content outside of the secure extranet.
Once solution is to mark the content as being secure, or grouping it
together under certain labels or headings.
In all of these
design decisions, you are going to most prepared if you test your
extranet on real customers. Don't assume you know what they want. You
need to understand how they do their jobs through your company. They are
seeking your help, you are not selling them a solution. If your design is
built around their way of life, then you will succeed.
I would suggest
that you develop templates for your extranet tools and content. Be
prepared to move items around on each page. You might even consider
setting up the site to be modular in that customers can specify the
location of each piece of information, and each tool. Consider that your
extranet might be best designed as a dynamic web site, with dynamic tools
and content.
Below is a list of some
more specific development issues.
- Cultural Sensitivity:
If your company does business around the world, you will suddenly need
to be very concerned about how your internal systems might look to
customers with different cultural expectations. Companies can often
hide behind sales and marketing, but once an extranet goes live,
customers can see how you really do business. Let's face it, if you
put geeks in charge of your extranet they will offend customers
because they probably don't have the cultural training. Be sure to
understand how your extranet design and data will impact customers
from different countries.
- User Authentication:
Be sure that you have tested your security repeatedly before, during,
and after you launch your extranet. An extranet is an exposed part of infrastructure
and it must be rock solid. Also, you'll need to think about how you
are going to give users their usernames and passwords. Do they choose
their own usernames and passwords? How will you generate passwords?
Will you require users to change their passwords every 90 days or once
per year?
- Employee Turnover: If
your company is in an industry with a high level of employee turnover,
how do you plan on dealing with it? If your customers' employees leave
their jobs, how will you know? How will you work with your customers
to ensure that those accounts are closed? Have a plan! Be sure that
your extranet infrastructure can handle the rapid changes; make it
flexible.
- Gatekeepers: With a
constant flow of new user registrations, you will have to have a solid
business process in place. You need people dedicated to handling new
users, lost passwords, and employee turnover. Extranets can decrease
the interaction between you and your customers (e.g., reduced calls),
but it does not mean that your interaction with customers will be
eliminated.
- Training: Most web
sites are hard to use. However, most users decide that they can suffer
through the experience if the reward is high enough. For example, many
users don't mind figuring out how to use a web site if the prices are
really good and if they don't have to deal with other humans. However,
with an extranet, these rules don't apply. An extranet is a tool that
is meant for your customers and you are on the line. They know they
can beat up on you if the extranet isn't excellent. For this reason,
you should probably consider developing training material for your web
site. This is probably a foreign idea to you but think about it for a
moment. A good training package will get your customers excited about
the extranet and it will save you support costs done the line. Have
your sales force run the training; it gives them a chance to get in
front of customers and generates a lot of goodwill.
- Quality Versus
Usability: After security, the most important thing about an
extranet is quality, particularly quality of your data. It is critical
that when you design your extranet that the data is right and that you
can back up what you are showing your customers. In this case,
usability is not as important as quality. Your applications must be
tested again and again. You are showing your customers how you handle
their data, so it must be done right. Fortunately, as quality
increases usability increases since they are positively
correlated.
Of course there are many of
other design issues. The list above should get you thinking about all of
the possibilities. The main thing to realize is that your extranet will be
substantially different than your regular external site and your
intranet.
Business
Issues
Business issues
are the issues you will face inside your organization. These are sometimes
the most difficult issues to tackle because you can't just throw money or
developers at them. They require making changes to how people operate,
which can be painful.
An extranet is a
serious endeavor and will require the attention of the entire company. It
is very unlikely that you can throw a small guerilla team at the challenge
and have them succeed. You need to be sure that entire organization
understands the importance of the extranet.
Suppose that you
make widgets and customers sometimes call your company with complaints.
Imagine that a call center representative enters the issue into a backend
system with some derogatory comments in some "hidden" fields -
ones that are not supposed to ever be seen by the customer. Remember, the
non-extranet way of thinking is that you can use your language, in your
system, any way you want. Employees might even be encouraged to use
colorful language. If that call center representative doesn't understand
that the call in the system is open to customers, then there could be a
serious problem. It doesn't take much to look like a jackass in this kind
of situation. My rule of thumb is that any customer data in any system
should be treated as though a customer would see it. Remember, an
extranet is not your tool, it is your customer's tool. Your web site is
really their web site.
An extranet
needs the right kind of marketing. I don't understand why more companies
don't talk about their extranets. My only guess is that they don't
understand the goldmine they are sitting on. An extranet is a great
strategic weapon. The marketing and sales organizations need to promote
the extranet. If it is done right, the advantages will be obvious and the
"sale" will be easy. Don't forget to tell people about the
extranet.
Another business
issue is training. High power extranets require time and energy to learn.
The more power you add, the more time it will take for folks to learn. No
amount of usability will truly make an extranet simple. You will probably
have to throw some time and money at training, both onsite and offsite. Be
prepared with documentation. Help customers before they need help. Make
the pre-emptive strike and train right away. By the way, training turns
into selling, which is often a good thing.
Speaking of
training, you will want to train your employees before you launch the
extranet. Don't be foolish enough to think that you can launch an
extranet, or series of extranets, and have them operate without the help
of your employees. Keep everyone in the loop. Your employees should be
advanced users, so that when the calls come in, as they always do, you are
prepared to help your customers. If the tools are good, your employees
should be using them for their jobs too.
Types of Tools
Each company will be able to
offer their customers different tools. However, to get you thinking about
some of your options, below is a list of some of the applications you
might want to include as part of your extranet.
- Whitepapers: The
idea with whitepapers is to give customers special information that is
not available to people who are not customers. Your knowledge is a
great asset and can be an important part of your extranet. While a
whitepaper is not a web application, the value can be extremely high.
- Flow Tracking:
Customers love to know what is going on behind the scenes at your
company. They want to know how you are helping them and when they can
expect results. If you are building something for them, tell them
where you are in the build process. If you are going to ship something
to them, tell them where it is in the shipping process. If you are
tracking information in your company about a customer, consider
putting a tool on your extranet to let customers track what you know.
- Call Center: If
customers call you with issues, you should track them and allow
customers to see how those issues are being resolved. When you are
done taking care of the issue, send them an email. Also, you might
want to aggregate the issues into a FAQ or even a knowledge base.
Then, when customers call, you can simply point them to the answers.
- Estimators and
Calculators: Why force customers to call you to get a quote if
they can get their own online? Put your internal tools online and let
customers do their own work. If you are curious about their behavior,
track it. Think of all the spreadsheets and databases that are used to
figure things out internally. Consider exposing those tools on your
extranet.
- Discussion Boards:
You can allow customers to post their questions and comments on a
secure discussion board. You might want to moderate it, but maybe not.
This will allow your customers to help each other and it will also let
you know what problems they are having. You might want to keep it
anonymous, at east between customers.
There are plenty of other tools
you could offer through your extranet. The list above is merely meant to get
you thinking about what you should expose to customers. When you start
thinking about it, you'll realize there are a lot of good things you can
give your customers through your extranet.
Final Thoughts
Hopefully you see that
extranets are complex but offer high value to your customers. They also can
significantly decrease some of your costs. Of course, they often require a reallocation
of resources and a substantial cultural change.
If you are able to really
decrease costs, then consider dropping some of your prices. For example, if
your extranet drops the total cost of the quotation process by 12%, consider
dropping the price of your product by a couple of percentage points. If
nothing else, consider using the savings as part of your product
discounting.
Building an extranet is not a
trivial exercise. You need to worry about security, internal culture
changes, changing costs, and a lot more. However, the return on investment
can make extranets very valuable. Be sure to measure costs before and
after you build your extranet. The data will help you determine which
applications to work on next. You might also want to measure customer
satisfaction before and after the installation of your extranet. Senior
management will want to see that proof that the extranet was worth the
investment, and it will help them plan for the future. It will probably
help you keep your job too.
Comments?
Please send them to me: john@webword.com
I want to know what you think about this article.
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