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Article by Sam Martin, PE, CVS, President of OfficeOnWeb, Technologies. 1/13/1998

Lower your costs and improve customer support.
Everyone in business seems to think that gathering new customers is the big reason that they should be on the Internet. For an established business, this may not be the case. We had one customer that come to us to "increase their customer base." We took one look at their operations and said that they should not begin to look for new customers until they reduced their costs and improved customer support. Why? They were printing manuals for the equipment they manufactured to the tune of several millions of dollars each year. Make one mistake in the manual, and an addendum would need to be printed and inserted in each manual that was shipped. We advised that they stop printing as many of the manuals, reduce the cost of the product by the cost of printing and maintaining the space for the manual stock, give default access to the manual via the Internet, and allow people to pay the printing and storage costs to receive a printed copy. Thanks to our business consulting expertise advice, they lowered their costs by $500,000 and increased the relevancy of the manual seen by the user at the moment of purchase. By lowering the cost of the product by the cost of this manual and giving access to the manual via the web site, they increased their profit margin, reduced the need to issue updates and notifications of errors on their part to their customers, and insured that their customer had the latest information about their products.

Design your site so you can always ask, "Do you have Internet (web) access"

More than half the US population now has web access. Getting your manual online ensures that you have the latest revisions included in it, reduces the cost of printing for the manufacturer, and produces confidence in the product. Customers are better served and total costs to serve them are reduced. This allows the business to reduce their product charges so they can gain pricing advantages.

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Some issues that Office On web provides:

 Five redundant backbone connections

 99.999% up time on UNIX servers

 Redundant OC-3 connect to all five backbones

 Full data center services

RAID 5 system with weekly backup of critical systems

 True Web Developer Services

 Large support site for clients and visitors

 Four level or higherencryption on all e-commerce solutions designed by Office On Web (this is the government standard required if Government people are to use a site)

 We NEVER host a commercial site on an access server (that is really bad, but common in dial up providers)

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