“Instant Extranet’ Meets Ageless Business Need: Closer Customer Contact (NAPSA)—Can solving one problem lead to another? According to history, yes. Long ago, legend says, a German hamlet faced a rodent problem. The leaders of Hamelin realized that unless they brought the rat population under control, there would no longer be a hospitable environment for the villagers. Theycalled on the latest available technology, the marvelous Pied Piper. He rid the region of rats, but created more serious issues when the town fathers refused to pay the piper. Today, according to fact, organizations of all sizes applaud the Internet for making unprece- dented quantities of data easily available. Industry analysts say the problem of content management and communication with all constituents, however, has turned the flood of information from a benefit into a managementcrisis. A Solution in a Box A California software company has a solution. More than a dozen companies have paid the piper, and put Grey Zone’s product, SecureZone, to use. It is an “out- of-the-box” product combining the traits of content management, personalization, portal and security software, without the downside of cobbling disparate software programs together. SecureZone technology makes it flexible and easy to use. It can and has been used to build public Web sites as well as custom extranets. But the product has found its most valuable applications in two arenas: Channel Development and the allimportant Customer Retention portion of Customer Relationship Management. Channel Development GN ReSound, based in Den- mark,is one of the world’s largest and most successful hearing aid firms. Both language and distance barriers madeit difficult for the company to efficiently support 10,000 resellers in 22 countries with relevant timely information. The company used SecureZone to build reseller extranets offering personalized access to localized marketing collateral, a Web site builder, and a product knowledge base. The result: Channel marketing andloyalty programswith one platform forall. Customer Retention (e-CRM) Terayon is a broadband communications equipment leader for data, voice and video. As their breadth of product lines and number of customers grew, management looked for a way to increase the volume and intimacy of communications with its key customers, which included the top cable providers around the world. A veteran user of earlier versions of SecureZone, Matt Ott, e-Marketing Director for Terayon, used SecureZone to create co-branded customer extranets with personalized access to downloadable software updates, marketing collateral, and the entire product knowledge base. Their results: personalized customer support with decreased communication costs. Older solutions could solve only parts of the problem. Grey Zone focused on the needs of mid-sized enterprises, and brought all necessary benefits together. Perhaps the rats are winning the rat race, but a growing number of companies can now trap and tame the information they need. For more information visit www.greyzone.com.
