It's easy to talk about building customer loyalty. But actually providing the exceptional customer service experience that creates loyalty is another matter. To offer that customer experience requires employees who can respond quickly and personally to customer requests, whether it's for product information, a transaction history, or changes to a pending order. Empowered, knowledgeable employees become a company's customer service champions, and Microsoft is working to provide the technology that helps a company create them.

A company that provides great customer service can gain a competitive edge. That's because study after study shows that customers today aren't happy with the way they're treated. Dr. Claes Fornell, of the University of Michigan, notes that in recent years the difficulty faced by retailers and others in meeting customer expectations and handling growing customer volume has led to declines in customer satisfaction in a wide range of industries, from retail to healthcare to travel.

Delivering a great customer experience becomes even more challenging, Dr. Fornell says, when customers show up in a somewhat sour mood due to rising energy prices and the feeling that their paycheck isn't going as far as it once did. Moreover, notes Dr. Fornell, customer dissatisfaction has wide implications. "The U.S. economy is heavily dependent on increases in consumer spending," he says. "Such increases are hard to come by when consumers become less satisfied."

It doesn't help that customers today have more choices than ever before, whether it's seeking merchants on the Internet, demanding greater customization, or wanting answers to questions around the clock.

Clearly, offering superb customer service confers enormous benefits on a company. The right technology can create a pathway to great customer service by empowering employees to fully focus on the customer rather than spending their customer contact time looking up records or asking other employees for help. With information about a customer or a company's products at their fingertips, employees can put to work their experience and desire to succeed for any company that relies on satisfied customers. And satisfied customers become what a company really needs: loyal customers.

Lifetime Products, a manufacturer of polyethylene folding tables and basketball equipment for homes, uses technology to keep its retail customers happy in a way that was impossible just a few years ago. Back then, Lifetime managers often needed hours or days to respond to customer requests because they lacked the ability to easily access customer information or respond to customer requests regardless of when they came in. But customer expectations were changing, and Lifetime had to meet them. "If a buyer sends me an e-mail, and I don't respond within a couple of hours, then I am considered non-responsive, "says Richard Hendrickson, Lifetime's president.

Now, an order management and customer management suite built with Microsoft technology keeps Lifetime's sales force in constant contact with customers almost regardless of where a Lifetime employee might be. Customer account information can be easily accessed by using laptop computers or wireless telephones, and customers' accounts are handled more efficiently with fewer sales managers than were needed previously. Vince Rhoton, Lifetime's vice president of sales says, "We respond faster than our competitors, so it is a major business advantage."

Lifetime's commitment to better customer service has paid big dividends—20 to 25 percent increases in sales without adding staff. And the company's new system also helps it save time and money when dealing with suppliers and manufacturers.

As Lifetime's experience demonstrates, technology can be used to reinvent how a company keeps in touch with customers. That's true not only in the business-to-business sphere, where Lifetime operates, but also at the consumer level. Savvy retailers can smoothly integrate the Internet with call centers and retail stores, connecting with customers through state-of-the-art operating systems, personal digital assistants (PDAs), Smartphones, technology-enhanced stores, and more—all in a way that goes far beyond traditional retail formulas. The same holds true for the hospitality and restaurant industries, where technology can help offer more personalized customer service and better amenities while improving day-to-day operations.

Technology also can be tailored to the particular way a business wants to foster customer loyalty, whether it's by helping a business offer superb service, deliver great products, or minimize costs through operational efficiencies, or through flexible, go-anywhere connections with partners and suppliers.

To make the most of technology, a company that wants to create loyal customers needs technology tools that easily and quickly provide employees the information they need, whether it's a customer record, information about products, purchase options, or how to resolve a problem. That information must be available in a way that helps employees focus on the customer rather than on the technology. And the technology has to work wherever the customer is found, whether on a sales floor, in an office, in a customer's home, or even when a customer is driving a car or walking around town.

Today, technology has the power to transform the customer experience and a company's success. The business that understands the challenges of building customer loyalty in today's business environment, and that deploys tools that help employees foster that loyalty, is the one that will succeed in the future.

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