Customer service [in e-business]

When you're in business, it's good to have customers, but do you have customer service in mind when you're developing technology for an e-business Web site? If not, you should, because the place where your work and the customers' experience comes together is where you can make it easy-or hard for customers to do business at a site. If you can understand customer intentions at an e-business site, you can factor them into technology choices and mechanisms that support them. Is it easy for a single-minded customer to find and buy a product, or for a holistic-minded user to do a combination of browsing, learning and shopping? While the marketing people decide what goes on a site and the content developers create the look-and-feel, the front-row seat for data mining is with the technical staff who know what information is available in log files, what profiling can be dynamically processed in the background and indexed into the dynamic generation of HTML, and what performance can be expected from the servers and network to support customer service and make e-business interaction productive.