Your engineers visit a customer's site to repair a high-value item. It's 5pm when they finally identify the problem part - and it will need to be replaced. All they can tell the customer is "Sorry, we'll check when we get back to the office tomorrow morning, and one of our customer service staff will be in touch to schedule another visit".

Look how WAP would help - the engineer uses their WAP handset to connect to your company's spare parts computer system. They enter the part number of the damaged item. At 5:10pm they give an update to the customer "Unfortunately the spare part is not in stock here in Hong Kong. I've found the nearest one is in Singapore, and requested it to be sent by courier. We shall have the part midday tomorrow, and be back to finish the repair at 3pm tomorrow."

The customer has been given the best service possible. The total time to fix the problem has been reduced by one day. It required less staff at your company, and the chance of any transcription errors is eliminated.

Other ideas we've heard :

• "Online access to our order system will let our salespeople give up-to-date status reports when they are meeting customers."
• "When branch managers of our shops meet with regional managers, they can check online if they have any disagreements about sales figures."
• "Many of our target customers are not computer-users. If we can let them access our services via their mobile phone, we can reach a whole new market."
• "Our executives find a notebook computer is too heavy, and too difficult to connect. If we can give them an easier way to access our company's information, we can improve their efficiency."

I have to admit these are not all our own ideas. Each week we give WAP briefings to resellers and their customers, and as usual we've learned something new at every meeting. Please contact us to discuss WAP in your business, or to arrange a briefing.