customer relations management made easy


"The ability to easily and automatically merge specific information in order to create one-to-one personal messages is exactly what your clientele expect and deserve."
    -- Wade Bruendl
          Vice-President, Boeing Wichita Credit Union, Wichita, KS


Welcome to CUSoon


There's no magic to good customer relations. It entails little more than insuring that every transaction be simple, quick, polite and accurate. In that regard, one of the most important things that you can do for a client is to keep them informed of their current status.

When email is used judiciously and with concern for the recipient, it has an enormous potential to become a mechanism to greatly increase customer loyalty and satisfaction.

A few companies are already doing this with extraordinary success: Amazon.com, Ebay, Southwest Airlines, Expedia.com and Dell Computer. Amazon is especially worth noting. For four years running now, Amazon.com has received the very highest customer satisfaction ratings ever received by any service organization, with each year being better than the last.

If you've ever ordered a book from Amazon, you received a confirmation email of that order in just a few minutes. A day or so later, when the book shipped, you received another email telling you of the shipment, giving you the shipment method and the tracking numbers. Or, if there was a delay in the shipment, Amazon notified you as to the extent of the problem and the expected new ship date.

The intent of CUSoon, in a single sentence, is to convert your organization into Amazon.com for $2500.

CUSoon's email has been designed to contain highly specific information that will be valuable to the recipient — that would only be sent when it is known to be of some use to him.

Because of these values, CUSoon has broad applicability to a wide variety of organizations, most especially financial institutions, manufacturers, universities and colleges.

Presume for the moment that you operate a financial institution, a bank or a credit union. The emails that you might create with CUSoon are:

  • notices of loan approval
  • notices that monthly statements are now available on-line
  • notices of payroll deposits into your account
  • notices of received wire transfers
  • notices of insufficient funds and the return of checks
  • notices that your checking account has fallen below a preset level
  • notices that funds have been automatically transferred from your savings accounts into checking
  • notices of current loan rates
  • notices of loan payments, including the current statuses of the loans (balances, amortization dates, interest paid to date, etc.)
  • notices of changes in adjustable rate mortgages
  • notices of CD renewal dates
  • notices that deposited checks have been returned due to insufficient funds for which your account has been debited
You have all of this information in your databases as to when these events transpire. While you would never have sent out the majority of these items if you had to print a piece of paper, put it into an envelope, and mail it, the costs of transmitting these notices with CUSoon now drop to zero.

But far more important than reducing your costs of operation, these notices bind your customers to you. They keep your clients informed as to their immediate status and what actions they might have to take to avoid unnecessary charges. Information, even bad news, is always far more valuable when delivered promptly, especially when it works to minimize customer confusion. This is a level of service that you couldn't have provided in the past, but you're going to find it quite easy now with CUSoon.


The Design Criteria of CUSoon

CUSoon has been designed with these criteria in mind:
  • That it be very simple to operate
  • That it be essentially maintenance-free
  • That it be readily interfaceable to the oldest, most rigid "legacy" databases and operating systems with ease
  • That your host(s) are not exposed to the internet
  • That plain text and HTML emails of extraordinary quality can be created and merged with ease with the data derived from your host database(s)
  • That the costs of daily operation are made as close to zero as possible
CUSoon doesn't run on your host computer(s). Rather, it executes from a Windows-based PC. This not only makes its operation simple, it also makes CUSoon resistant to obsolescence and completely agnostic to the mix of host operating systems and databases that you may choose to operate in the future. CUSoon has been designed around internet standards, not operating systems requirements.

The PC that you use may be a dedicated machine in your computer room, or it may be a PC on anyone's desk, used for other work. CUSoon will not consume a significant percentage of the machine's processing power.

Because CUSoon is internal to your organization, you have total control over its activities, providing you with an extraordinary level of flexibility with almost no increase in complexity of operation. Nor does CUSoon incur any day-to-day costs, as would be associated with outsourced solutions. Its daily operational costs truly are zero.

A brief summary of CUSoon's method of operation is presented in the technical fact sheet:

How CUSoon Works (31K PDF)

Instructions outlining the process of programming CUSoon appear here:

Programming CUSoon

Although your license will allow you to run CUSoon on as many PCs as you wish, you will probably never want to run it on more than one PC at a time.


System Specifics

Machine requirements:
  • a Pentium-class PC
  • any 32-bit version of the Microsoft Windows operating system (95, 98, Me, NT, 2000, or XP)
  • an internet connection to your email service provider
  • a LAN-based FTP connection to your several hosts

Performance:

  • Because each email is independently merged with specific data intended for only one recepient, each email must be transmitted independently. The rate of transmission of emails in this circumstance tends to be a little more than one email per second. The majority of this cycle time will be spent in negotiation with your ISP's host. Thus, if you are to send 10,000 emails, the total transmission time will be about two and a half hours.

Price:

  • $2495.00 (US), plus maintenance support for the first year (see below).

  • $500.00 (US) per annum maintenance charge thereafter (optional).

  • A 45-day demonstration copy of CUSoon is available for your consideration at no charge.

Support:

  • Support is basically unlimited. We work under the rules that you should never be confused for more than ten minutes. If you're confused longer than that, it's time to call.

  • Support is available Monday through Friday, business hours, Mountain Time.

  • Support is not limited to merely technical questions. The people in marketing, management and customer relations will be actively involved in transmitting whatever emails you send to your customers and we are pleased to do whatever we can to support these people as well.


Additional Documents

AICS Research home page