The previous two sections have focused on the operation of the marketing concept at the levels of the development of strategy and organisational change in relation to the introduction of e-commerce.

This section focuses on the operational level in considering how e-commerce on its own and in conjunction with other channels is being used in relation to customers. Respondents from all four organisations mentioned three common elements of customer management that they expected to be delivered through e-commerce. These were:

(1) the provision of information on individual accounts;

(2) two-way communication with customers;

and

(3) self-servicing of transactions.

These contacts can be considered to be significant to the marketing process because of the importance of customer service as part of a consideration of the total relationship that the organisation has with the customer. Relationship marketing has been put forward as the new paradigm in marketing, in particular with regard to its significance in services companies. It is defined as being about establishing, maintaining, and enhancing relationships with customers and other partners (GroÈnroos, 1994, 1996) and provides an alternative view to the traditional US functional model of marketing. The services marketing literature (Reicheld and Sasser, 1990; Berry and Parasuraman, 1991) stresses the link between service quality and customer satisfaction and retention. It is argued that by improving the quality of service customer satisfaction will be improved and in turn a satisfied customer will be favourably disposed to a strong relationship with the provider. There may be a new type of opportunity to nurture customer relationships by using e-commerce. It may have advantages in optimising the quality of two-way contact (Sharpe, 1999) and by combining the ability to respond directly to customer requests and to provide the customer with a highly interactive, customised experience, companies may have a greater ability to establish, nurture, and sustain long-term relationships (Winer, 2001).

At Insco the degree to which end customer relationships are managed is strictly limited because the primary relationship with the customer is through the IFA and therefore direct interaction with end customers through either e-commerce or conventional means was negligible. Similarly at Internatco the focus in the past has not gone much past the IFA. Therefore, according to the Internatco project manager: If you define our customers as IFAs, at least initially, I think we are very well aware of what IFAs are doing and what they want from e-commerce.

The Internatco sales manager notes that there is a certain amount of commonality in the approach of half a dozen large insurance companies who have done their groundwork to find out what IFAs want from e-commerce. The Internatco organisation development manager sees electronic automation to be a source of competitive advantage to try and develop a distinctive proposition for intermediaries. At the same time a number of the Internatco respondents recognise that dealing primarily at arm's length to the customer, through intermediaries, will be challenged by e-commerce with the idea of providing a direct route for the customer to contact the company. With the development of e-commerce it is anticipated that there will be far more contact with end customers ± with a big communications centre: Now we will have more contact with them at pre-sale and even more contact after the sale, because they will be able to see their portfolio, etc. (Internatco marketing manager). This new operation selling direct to the end customer is seen as a model for the future by the Internatco organisation development manager. The problem is that this is in conflict with the existing way of operating in business channel silos with each laying claim to ``own'' their customers.

A similar challenge in managing customers in a consistent manner across the many different ways that customers may now interact with the organisation is also recognised by many of the Buildsoc respondents. The Buildsoc business improvement manager points out: One challenge is to actually make that customer experience and infrastructure as consistent as we can across all channels . . . exactly how we structure it . . . we need to think about it, but perhaps we need to be looking at the needs of customers, how they are defined across the channel. There will be somebody looking at the specific infrastructure associated with one particular channel, but I think we should be looking at the customer relationship and the management of that across the piece. There are major implications for branch roles in customer management if increasingly transactions become more self-service. In theory advisors in branches could be more focused on customer needs at different stagesof life and providing advice. In this information collected online may help in understanding customer needs, according to the Buildsoc online services development manager:

We want to build up a profile of the members' habits online. If we're providing them with non-financial content, we also get a better picture of their interests and of their likes and dislikes and that helps us build up a profile and it helps us to further member relationship management across all distribution channels. At the same time the creation of a central customer service unit to deal with telephone and e-commerce customer contact means that feedback is gathered in a central administrative area and head office staff are receiving direct communication from customers on service issues. In taking an integrated approach to e-commerce Buildsoc has added a further new channel and created some major challenges for itself in effectively and consistently managing the customer relationship across both the traditional and new channels. Things are much simpler at Interbank, where customer management is totally confined to this one business unit. It is claimed that Interbank was developed from the start from the point of view that it needed to be customer focused, with new staff, a new culture and processes that were designed around the customer and channel. Emphasis is put on the way everyone responds to customer comments. As the Interbank business strategy manager says:

I think the trick is not only getting the feedback, but being able to react to the feedback. In talking about his role the Interbank operations manager claims to worry about what the customer worries about. He gives a specific example of an exercise that demonstrates this approach:

We're struggling at the moment to understand the way in which customers are contacting us and why they're sending us e-mails. Why they're contacting us that way and how often do they send us e-mails, how quickly do they want a response to those e-mails? How do we schedule our workloads internally within the service centre to be able to handle those e-mails and handle those secure messages and get them back to customers within what they think is reasonable, which is generally within 24 hours. There is also a lot of emphasis at Interbank on involving all staff in understanding customer requirements and in improving the service. Feedback is collected and then all staff are involved in coming up with suggestions for improvements. The aim is to create an environment where staff act on what they hear from customers, often taking on responsibilities outside their nominal role in order to resolve customer issues.

Interbank demonstrates the way that CRM can be implemented effectively from a standing start with new customers. The advantage of short chains of command in Interbank is that you can get things done quickly as communications are simple and decisions can be made rapidly. However it is also recognised that this commitment to reacting quickly to feedback needs to be maintained despite the growth of the operation. What Interbank does demonstrate is how the marketing concept can work effectively at the operational level. A strong parallel can be drawn with Kohli and Jaworski's (1990) information processing model of market orientation in the way that intelligence from the customer is collected, shared within the organisation and acted upon. Alternatively, taking Narver and Slater's (1990) culture based model of market orientation, Interbank can be seen to have a very customer focused culture and it is effective in achieving interfunctional coordination in responding to customer requirements.

For a market-oriented organisation it is not enough to be focused on customers and competitors; it is necessary to be responsive to changes in the market (Kohli and Jaworski, 1990). In a large organisation this involves a high degree of interfunctional coordination (Narver and Slater, 1990). Small focused teams have been instrumental in forcing through change in both Buildsoc and Interbank. The Buildsoc marketing manager recognises the benefit of smaller group decision-making to short cut bureaucratic processes: I think a lot of people are warming to the idea that the business should be making the decisions in smaller groups and those smaller groups reporting their decisions to other groups, not necessarily inviting other groups to comment. There's got to be a corporate ownership and a greater level of trust in people's decision making . . . so I think the e-development has been a great stimuli to say do we really have to make decisions this slow and have committee meetings all over the place?

This is also recognised by the Buildsoc retail operations manager who suggests: The answer might be to make yourself small in the way you operate, but within a big context. That sounds a bit odd, but if you look at the companies that seem to be able to produce things very quickly [they] are very small companies. Then they get big and that slows them down. It's a question of acting small but being big, if that makes sense.

The need to see across the organisational strands and also focus on the shortest timeline for implementation is challenging and is not something that traditional management training has prepared people for (Smith, 1998). It requires seeing the detail for each area and type of person involved, while also keeping the big picture in mind. This cannot be hierarchical (Miles et al., 2000) and traditional rules do not always apply. In Buildsoc and Interbank small teams with the heavyweight support of their respective chief executive were seen to be the best way of overcoming some of the challenges in getting change projects underway. However this was not the end of the story. Getting a change initiative underway is only the start, it then needs to be fully integrated within the organisation.

In order to take advantage of the benefits of e-commerce Porter (2001) stresses the imperative for companies to develop tailored value chains to build up defensible competitive advantage. This involves a high degree of cross-activity integration, for instance sales activities linked with order processing. There is an appreciation from the Insco marketing manager that the response to e-commerce should be integrated: It's not just marketing, it's not just IT, it's product development, it's the whole business and I think people aren't aware of that enough across the business to be thinking in those terms.

Despite the initial success of getting the e-commerce projects off the ground, in some of the case studies, there were very real challenges identified in developing and sustaining an integrated and coordinated cross-functional approach to long-term implementation, where it was taking place within the existing organisation. In the Interbank case study the creation of the separate operation seems to have overcome some of these by sidestepping the issue. The point is that, for an existing company doing business on the Internet, a range of organisational issues arise requiring major adjustments to the organisational infrastructure: culture, people and structures (Boddy and Boonstra, 2000). But changes to mental models and norms (Kondra and Hinings 1998) can be psychologically threatening (Ashkenas, 2000). Therefore it needs to be recognised that the strategic Qualitative Market Research: An International Journal Volume 5 . Number 4 . 2002 . 252±260 decision to develop an innovation will have massive organisational implications (Prahalad and Hamel, 1990). The size of the challenge is neatly summed up by the Insco e-commerce manager: The company started in [date] ± 150 years odd of doing things by paper, it is hard to move the whole organisation and there are few visionaries around that realise that.

The issue of implementation of strategy is recognised in the major market orientation models, however it can be argued that this element is explained less than comprehensively. Kohli and Jaworski (1990) have less to say on responsiveness than intelligence generation or dissemination, but it is at the core of their model. Responsiveness is the action taken in response to market trends, involving virtually all departments in the organisation. However Jaworski and Kohli (1993) acknowledge that their analysis does not shed much light on the change process. In the alternative model of Narver and Slater (1990) the mechanics of responding to change in an integrated manner is described as interfunctional coordination. To accomplish this effectively companies need to develop horizontal structures and manage projects through small multi-functional teams (Slater and Narver, 1994), but they also need to become learning organisations (Slater and Narver, 1995). They agree with Day (1994) that superior ability to learn is critical because of the acceleration of technological change and the need to development distinct competencies to achieve competitive advantage. However they accept that there is no widely accepted theory of what comprises the culture and climate of a learning organisation.