About serving business customers over the Internet.
In 2002, we definitively proved that pigs could not fly. In 2005, we felt the need to assess the flight worthiness of ferrets. As it turned out, they couldn’t fly either. But the Web in general was set to soar.
View 2005 › or Start at 1989“A lot of manual work was done so if the customer wanted a copy of the invoice, I would need to wait quite a few days before the actual people down in Christchurch who actually do the billing, have produced the actual bill, send it up to me here in Wellington and then send it off to the customer. Time delays are the biggest things. It could take a week for me to get that or if it was a particularly bad billing week for them, it could take two to three weeks for them to get it to me. Things like data... if a customer wanted to know what was happening on their site, how much they were using... that information could take up to a month for me to get once it all came in. In about 2003-2004, we developed a business tool called Business Online. That was a huge tool that was just great for us. It meant that customers could go online, pick up a pdf of their invoice the day after it was produced, they could download their data that the invoice had been produced from. It just cut out the time that they needed to wait for them to be able to do things on their own side so it was great.”