Customer Relationship: IBM Way
By CXOtoday Staff
Mumbai, May 18, 2007

IBM announced a new virtual business center, which will enable clients to shape the future of their business. This center will enable the IBM sales people, clients, and partners to meet, learn, collaborate, and conduct business together.

The business center will focus on six segments namely reception, sales center, technical support library, innovation center, client briefing, and conference center. It will be looked after by IBM sales representatives from around the world, who will look into the matter of the visitors in several languages and build business relationships.

Daniel Dias, director of IBM (India Research Laboratory) said, "IBM is combining a 3-D virtual experience, its existing 2-D Website, and real IBM people to conduct business. And since we are naturally wired for 3 dimensions, we believe this will make customers' business experiences more effective."

The IBM sales representative will help the clients who are interested in buying hardware, software, services or solving a business problem through exchange of private information such as signing of contracts, passing of money or credit information. It would be done through a link to IBM's website or by phone.

The IBM employees will hold this new office in their respective countries, and will speak in languages like English, Portuguese, German, Spanish, Dutch, Italian, French, and Canadian. One advantage of entering into a virtual world is that one can get the information faster and in an easier manner than searching on the web site. In the virtual business center one can browse the 3-D book shelves, view 3-D book, or ask the librarian, just like in the real world.

IBM developed this center with NMC Virtual Worlds, a virtual services unit of the New Media Consortium (NMC), an international not-for-profit consortium of approximately 250 colleges, universities, museums, research centers, foundations, and companies. IBM has more than 30 other virtual islands for purposes such as research, on boarding of new employees, developer support, and IBM internal and client meetings.