Dell had developed customized intranet sites (called Premier Pages) for its 3,000 largest global customers; these sites gave customer personnel immediate on-line access to purchasing and technical information about the specific configurations of products that their company had purchased from Dell or that were currently authorized for purchase.18 The Premier Pages contained all of the elements of Dell's relationship with the customer—who the Dell sales and support contacts were in every country where the customer had operations, detailed product descriptions, what software Dell loaded on each of the various types of PCs the customer purchased, service and warranty records, pricing, and the available technical support.19 Dell was readying Premier Page software improvements for introduction in the second half of 1998 with even greater functionality. One new feature made it easy for a customer to specify what types of machines and options their personnel should be authorized to purchase. Other features included allowing customer personnel to access detailed information about Dell products on-line, view all the different machines and options the customer had authorized for its personnel, obtain the price of the particular PC they wanted, place an order, and have the order automatically routed to higher-level managers for approval. These features eliminated paper invoices, cut ordering time, and reduced the internal labor needed to staff corporate purchasing functions. Dell was said to have the most comprehensive Web-based PC commerce capability of any PC vendor. The company's goal was to generate 50 percent of its sales on the Internet within the next two or three years by setting up Premier Pages for virtually all of its large customers and adding more features to further improve functionality. So far, customer use of Premier Pages had boosted the productivity of salespeople assigned to these accounts by 50 percent.
The company also gave its large customers access to Dell's own on-line internal technical support tools, allowing them to go to www.dell.com, enter some information about their system, and gain immediate access to the same database and problem-solving information that Dell's support personnel used to assist call-in customers.20 This tool was particularly useful to the internal help-desk groups at large companies.