Overview

An Extranet is a private area of your web site that is for external parties (members only). A Company may wish to allow its customers onto an Extranet to view information specifically for them such as statements, status of a project or order tracking. Or a company may have a partner area of their web site with information only for partners such as partner pricing, programmes and incentives.

Why use an Extranet?

An Extranet is probably one of the best ways to improve customer relations via the web. An Extranet can save costs, improve productivity and customer service.

How?

Many companies produce customer specific documents such as invoices, statements, progress reports, order placement and order tracking. An Extranet allows a customer to access this information whenever he wants it. This can be a valuable service to him – he doesn’t have to wait until the end of the month for a statement and he doesn’t have to request an interim statement. There can also be significant cost savings in not having to print and distribute these documents. Think of the savings in paper and distribution costs if telephone companies no longer sent their clients paper bills! Electronic presentation of this information on an Extranet could allow customers to download itemised bills and sort and check the data offline.

For loyalty schemes, customers could log on and check how many points they have, browse through a catalogue of prizes and exchange their points for prizes, all without having to print and update catalogues and without the administrative staff to enter orders.

A Company launching a new product put the information on their web site about the new product. At the same time, they put information on their intranet to help their sales people sell this product – the type of customer to sell it to, who the competition are, marketing materials, pricing, regulatory requirements etc. By integrating its external and internal web sites, this company created a powerful, holistic information system to distribute information to their customers and empower their sales force.

At HDIS, we have the experience of helping our customers realise these benefits and create competitive advantage by implementing our powerful Claromentis framework more