Instead of having to sort through a mountain of clippings or having to master the arcane commands needed to search databases, Individual's customers-which include such diverse companies as MCI Telecommunications, McKinsey &. Company, Avon Products, and Fidelity Investments - effortlessly receive timely, fresh, relevant articles delivered right to their desks by fax, groupware (such asLotus Notes), on-line computer services, the Internet, or electronic mail.When someone signs up for Individual's First! service, the company assigns an editorial manager to determine what sort of information the client wants. The editorial manager and the client reduce those requests to simple descriptions, such as articles about new uses of information technology in home health care or about new products developed by Japanese semiconductor companies. The editorial manager enters the requests into Individual's SMART software system (for System for Manipulation and Retrieval of Text). Then SMART takes over. Every business day, the system searches 400 sources containing more than 12,000 articles for those pieces that will most likely fit the client's needs, and it delivers them by whatever method the client has chosen.Every week, Individual asks a new client (by fax or computer) to rate each article as "not relevant," "somewhat relevant," or “very relevant." The responses are fed into the system, making SMART even smarter. In the first week of service, most customers find only 40% to 60% of the articles to be somewhat or very relevant. By the fourth or fifth week, SMART has increased those ratings to a targeted 80% to 90%. Once it has achieved that level, Individual reduces the frequency of the ratings to once a month, which still enables it to keep abreast of customers' changing needs.Individual also responds constantly to clients' requests for new sources and ways of receiving information. Sun Microsystems, for example, asked the company to place First! on its internal Internet server. Once Individual provided this service, it discovered that many other clients that also depended on the Internet for sending and sharing information wanted to receive the service in the same way. Such responsiveness is undoubtedly one
đang được dịch, vui lòng đợi..
