Most web sites set themselves two core goals: providing the traditional "brochure ware" sales content about the organisations products or services, and secondly to provide some kind of online shopping facility. Each are critical, but we have seen many sites that have completely ignored what we believe is the single largest business opportunity that can be applied into digital media; e-care, or e-service.

E-Care comes in several forms, each of which provide invaluable tools for a customer, and each provide significant benefits for the organisation. Each are designed to provide customer service without the interaction of a customer service agent via telephone. Customers can do some or all of these e-care activities:

• Manage online accounts - change personal details, analyse history of relationship and product usage.

• Execute transactions - open and close accounts, execute payments or top-ups of account credit.

• Conduct research, gain knowledge on "how to ....", compare services.

• Interact with the organisation - initiate disputes, report problems, escalate issues, receive update alerts, view or apply for promotions, give feedback or personal response.

The Digital Business can help define a clear e-service strategy, and ensure that there is clarity on issues such as segmentation of customers for e-care. By doing this, customers or stakeholders can be targeted with the right kind of service marketing strategies. Then, the trick is to build an e-care architecture that accommodates the changes needs and profile of customers as they adopt new communication channels in favour of other traditional technologies.

The Digital Business will help you determine the right mix of online e-care services needed to deliver the right choices for the customer. This mix could comprise any combination of online knowledge-base driven applications, automated e-mail response systems, account-management tools that integrate with the company customer systems, or interactive online tools like feedback tools, online communities, real-time service agent web chat, and even SMS, MMS and WAP capabilities.

Let us analyse the opportunity within your company and see whether we can make some real commercial improvements through the use of effective e-care tools.