We don't mean the people in internal departments using IT or the business sponsor who shakes the money tree to finance projects, but the people who pay your company for its product or service. Real customers.

Just 10% of the 558 IT executives we polled in our latest "State of the CIO" survey identified "external customer focus" as critical to their jobs. That's not enough. The external customer is exactly whom CIOs should understand, says Rick Roy, senior vice president of customer operations at CUNA Mutual Group, a $3 billion company that provides services to credit unions.

IT, operations and customer service are melding, he says, especially in the financial services industry. But even across industries, understanding how customers interact with the company must inform the work of IT managers. Doing so can mean more profits for the company, but it's also "a tremendous opportunity for career development," he says. Roy was CIO at CUNA Mutual before taking over customer operations in December 2005.

Following are three ideas about the intersection of customers with technology that IT leaders should take into 2008:

Let folks talk; then listen to what they say

Giving customers online tools to review your site, service and products can spur sales. Shoppers are willing to pay 20 percent more for services receiving an "excellent" rating from fellow consumers, than for the same service receiving a "good" rating, according to research firms comScore and The Kelsey Group. The firms surveyed 2,000 Internet users in October about the influence of peer reviews on purchasing decisions.

Ninety-seven percent of those who said they made a purchase based on an online review said they found the review to have been accurate, the survey says. Perhaps most telling is that respondents said reviews generated by consumers had a greater influence than those done by professionals.

That kind of interactivity is another layer to manage in the relationship with customers, but consumers now expect to collaborate with each other and with their chosen companies, says Bill Band, an analyst at Forrester.

The problem, Band says, is that existing CRM suites from Oracle and SAP, for example, don't have built-in capabilities for blogs, forums, wikis and social networking. Analyzing the information generated in those interactive outlets requires special tools, he says.