For many years now, we have been quietly helping a handful of big name marketers implement web technologies in their business. One of the things I’ve noticed about the really successful clients is, they don’t focus on the technology. At the same time, from someone looking from the outside, it would seem like their businesses use some of the hottest and snazziest web technologies in their marketing and products.

How can that be? You see, what they focus on is the customers and customer experience. From that vantage point, they ask questions like:

• How can we better deliver this learning material so the student can take action immediately?
• How can we better reward our fans or evangelists – whatever you want to call them – for spreading the word?
• How can we better guide the customer through the checkout process for a better experience or turn it on its head?
• How can we build more value into our membership site so members will stay?

You get the idea. Once they begin asking themselves such questions, they sometimes bring me into the discussion to brainstorm solutions and help them determine which is technically do-able or which is going to take some work to get going. I absolutely LOVE these sessions because the end result is often a different way to engage and serve their visitor and customers.

Make no mistake. I love automation. I think it is awesome and we’d be so many times less productive if we didn’t have access to it. But there’s a lot of things technology can do besides automation. And very often it is not a new program you build from scratch. It can be something as simple as pre-filling forms for the subscriber or time-releasing goodies so customers aren’t distracted and can focus on the actual product they purchased.

Concentrate on how to deliver a better – whatever – to as many if not all of your existing customer or fan base and then hash out what technologies can help you accomplish that.