Taking Advantage of Your Assets

After spending thousands of dollars on marketing to lure potential customers onto your Web site, you see your site hits skyrocket but no movement in sales or customer acquisition. Strange? Not really. The problem is that once these people take the bait and click through to view a site, that's often when the process breaks down. EXP and its innovative- -and eerily logical- -Knowledge Exchange are setting out to change that.

Helping H&R block handle a portion of its extensive CRM effort this year with the development of a customized exchange of financial advisors, EXP has been able to show off what it can do. The product's fundamental appeal is really its simplistic goal: to effectively take advantage of human capital, which includes a company's entire value chain. So, whether you want to provide an added benefit by giving visitors a way to access internal expertise or appropriate partner expertise- -it will help turn those visitors into customers and provide a unique opportunity to up sell.

According to CEO Mark Benning, it's a way to put the control back in the customer's hands and empower the buyer, while effectively taking advantage of a company's assets, and providing customer service. "Rather than waiting for the customer to contact the company and being routed around," he said, "it lets them choose who they want to contact at the point of entry."
The technology allows users to quickly sort through the database by using specific searches (keyword, product, etc.) and then again by real-time availability, user rating and responsiveness of the expert. Users can contact experts by their preferred method (instant messenger, e-mail, etc.) and add evaluations to the profiles based on their experience. EXP hosts the entire Knowledge Exchange as an application service provider and, if a payment system is required, it even provides complete billing services.