RIYADH, 10 June — Last week we showed how the British government is using the Internet to reach out to its citizens through online portals. The American government is also working to get many of its services online and Paul Christy, director, Office of Information Systems, Commercial Service, US Department of Commerce, came to Saudi Arabia to meet with representatives of the government and business community to present an overview of the latest online services on offer.
The US Commercial Service, of which Christy is a member, is based in Washington, D.C. as a part of the US Department of Commerce, but over the last 20 years it has grown to represent US commercial interests worldwide. In the United States, the Commercial Service has 105 US Export Assistance Centers. They also have 157 posts outside the 50 states, in US consulates, US embassies and similar locations. Due to the importance of the Saudi-US trade relationship they have a strong presence here in the Kingdom.
“The main goal of the US Commercial Service is to help America’s small- and medium-sized businesses export their products, understand markets and understand customs so they can extend their businesses outside the United States,” explained Christy.
“That gives us at the US Commercial Service an interesting role because we need to straddle both the government with all of its constraints and its benefits, and the business community with its faster pace, focus on the bottomline and focus on the customer. I think that has had a great effect on the Commercial Service in that it has allowed us to understand exactly what the business community focuses on. And more and more the business community focuses on fast speed, customer service and understanding the core mission. This has led us at the Commercial Service to do a lot of soul-searching to determine what is our core mission. We’ve had to ask ourselves what we should and shouldn’t be doing, and how we can best reach our customers.”
One way that the US Commercial Service has been reaching out to its clients is by strengthening its communications infrastructure. Since 1991, they have been using worldwide telecommunications networks to connect their offices. A decade ago this was a very difficult and expensive operation using modems and creating small networks. About 1996, the US Commercial Service began to focus on what the Internet could provide. At first they used the Internet mostly for housekeeping services like e-mail. Almost immediately their communications costs were dramatically lowered because to a great extent they were able to use off-the-shelf solutions rather than costly custom designed solutions.
“We have been involved in the Internet for the last four or five years, largely in the sense of building a worldwide telecommunications network to link all of our staff together,” said Christy. “Our initial focus was connecting our employees and getting them to use housekeeping systems. We created an e-mail system. We began to learn how to collect information on what our business is and how well we’re doing it. We collected information on how we were spending and obligating our money. I think that’s always stage one of any organization as they start to approach their IT investments. They want to do business smarter, cheaper and better — and we were no different. There were a lot of cultural hurdles to get over, too, and we dealt with those in the first four or five years. Then we began to realize as we got closer to our customers that the customers were more interested in how they could make deals. It was all well and good for the Commercial Service to get its house in order, but the question our individual clients had for us was what have you done for me lately?”
In 1997, the US Commercial Service began to develop and deploy systems to track its clients. At this writing, the Commercial Service has about 80,000 clients that it works with outside of the US and about 70,000 clients that it works within the United States. In the US their clients are mostly American businesses who are based in the US or who get most of their revenue from American manufactured products. Outside of the country the Commercial Service works with current or potential buyers of US products. So at any one time the client management database is tracking about 150,000 clients worldwide. The database records information on clients such as an organization’s name, main contacts, subsidiary contacts, addresses, as well as the history of the relationship. Referring to the database can answer such questions as when were clients contacted and by who?
What services were provided? Did the client participate in a trade mission or receive counseling? And, most importantly did the Commercial Service provide the desired information or service successfully?
How does the US Commercial Service measure success? “We define success as a company that actually exported to a market or maybe it’s something as simple as we facilitated by our services their ability to solve a problem overseas,” said Christy. “In many respects the latter is probably the biggest service we provide because dealing with issues like trade complaints and payment difficulties are the highest hurdles for getting into and understanding a market and they take the most time in developing the business. Only after all of these challenges have been met successfully do you usually get an action such as an export to a client. So we define export success broadly to define all the things we can do for an American business. Our client management system was the key to understanding the breadth of American businesses and their reach. We came to realize exactly whom we are working for. It refocused the culture of the Commercial Service around those clients and made it our job as managers to tell all of our 1,800 employees worldwide — ‘If you’re not working on a client service you’re probably not doing something useful. Refocus your energy.’”
Once the basics were in place, according to Christy, there was even more “soul-searching” in the Commercial Service. It soon became apparent that the clients that were physically coming to the Commercial Service’s offices were just a small fraction of the clients who were actively doing business. Some companies had their own sources of information and the Internet was catching on fast — even outside the United States.
“A large and growing segment of the market was just out there in so-called cyberspace,” commented Christy. “They were doing research on the Internet, finding companies, contacting the companies and we weren’t there. So we realized that we had to be there. What we did was what any corporation or organization does, we put up a website, usatrade.gov. What this website did was give us a common presence in front of our clients. We put it on our business cards and directed everyone there and it tended to answer the first five questions that anyone had for us. We reduced our need to explain who we are and what we do. That was the big benefit of the website.
“The next generation of the website in 1999 got beyond that and was more proactive. The first site was reactive rather than proactive. In 1999, we started to develop a suite of services that for lack of a better term we called ‘PUSH.’ We began to use the information we had about our customers and the detailed profiles that we had about their interests, the markets that they wanted to go into and how they wanted to grow and we began to match those profiles up with the large amount of content that we had. When we found matches we would send out e-mails advising the companies of what was available. It was pretty successful. We had a lot of companies take us up on that service. It also identified for us a lot of the companies who weren’t really e-ready yet. We’d get a profile and we’d e-mail it to them and we’d find that they weren’t reading their e-mails. So we’d contact them and say, ‘We noticed that we’ve been sending you these things and you’ve never reacted. What’s wrong?’ More often than not they’d tell us that they just didn’t have the skills to compete and ask for our help.”
The Commercial Service developed a program in the US for rural companies to reach out to them and train them in the skills needed to get online. It gave them an understanding of the tools required for doing e-business. As the market matured the Commercial Service matured, too. They went from being internally organized, to having a public affairs site and a reactive presence on the web, to eventually developing a proactive presence online. Late in 1999 the idea of creating an e-market place began to get serious consideration. Two years later the Commercial Service is now ready for the launch of BuyUSA.com.
With an e-marketplace, after the identities of companies are verified and their participation is registered, the Commercial Service can step aside and allow business to flow unhindered. US companies indicate the type of services or goods they can provide. Foreign firms can then shop online for possible suppliers. It’s straightforward online matchmaking with the Commercial Service there on the ground to provide backup or reassurance as needed. During Christy’s visit to Saudi Arabia, he met with many businessmen to explain the features of the new e-market place and encourage them to give it a try.
“Companies may be able to successfully conclude a match totally online,” said Christy. “An e-mail would be sent to both parties saying here’s a buyer, here’s the way to conclude the deal and here’s our contact in Riyadh who can work with you if you have any problems. Our research found that this was the missing link for a lot of online businesses. There needs to be a local presence with local market intelligence to back up that Internet presence. Now a lot of young business people are very comfortable with the Internet as a tool. They do a lot of research on it. They don’t need much help. But we’re finding that many of the older businessmen are enticed to use the Internet because it does lower the cost per transaction but they also need the support of our folks on the ground. So we’re able to supply that. It extends the efficiency and the effectiveness of the US Commercial Service as it is supporting these businesses and makes the link very strong. BuyUSA.com was done in partnership with IBM so we have been able to leverage off their strength. BuyUSA represents the maturation of the US Commercial Service’s approach to business over the last ten years and it’s something that we’re very excited about. It positions us as a core within e-government to match up with business and provide services that they might not otherwise expect from a government.”