What Patten discovered was that the Salesnet product would allow his company to tailor the application’s user interface according to Sovereign’s sales processes and lexicon. The customization was so easy, in fact, that administrative assistants throughout the company could do it.

Using pull-down menus, drag-and-drop fields and point-and-click maneuvers, the administrative staff mapped Sovereign’s sales process to the software to create whole new layouts of information, modify existing layouts, change the way fields were labeled, and design pick lists (drop-down menus of information that salespeople can select). Patten says the application was rolled out to 325 employees in six months.

Salesnet has "these analysts that work with you to help you figure out the processes you have and how you’re going to customize their application to them, which is pretty amazing," says Paul Greenberg, author of CRM at the Speed of Light. He believes that "Salesnet does the best job of all the ASPs in customizing the application according to its customers’ sales processes."

Patten would agree. He says the customization his staff had to do didn’t cost the company more money. "It doesn’t drive up the cost even incrementally because of its simplicity," he says.

British Airways was also pleasantly surprised by its experience in customizing and integrating an ASP solution. The $11.9 billion airline had signed a contract with RightNow Technologies to automate the creation and management of different FAQ pages on its website, BA.com. British Airways knew it would have to radically change the ASP’s standard product to suit its exacting needs. For instance, the airline needed to automatically develop, manage and post different sets of FAQs for different customers, depending on whether they were members of British Air’s loyalty program. If the customer was enrolled in the program, the technology had to identify his tier (low, middle or high end). That way, if British Air offered a special promotion exclusively to top-tier members, it could post information about that promotion in a Q&A format on a page that was accessible only to top-tier members and not to lower-tier participants or other customers.

Setting up this capability meant that British Air’s customer database and Web authentication system had to pass customer information to RightNow in real-time so that the ASP could identify customers based on their membership status and provide the appropriate FAQ page. Dave Bevan, British Airways’ general manager for e-service, says that getting RightNow’s eService Center application to dance to his company’s tune was not easy. "It was quite challenging because we were trying to do things quickly and were quite demanding of time scales," he says. Daniel Butcher, lead developer with British Air on the RightNow project, says the integration work his company and RightNow needed to do was trickier than he had anticipated. The difficulty lay in preventing end users from being kicked off BA.com and onto RightNow’s website?a fix that required writing a small application to parse HTML and make sure hyperlinks were requested through British Air’s server.