Companies on the Web prefer spin to the din.

• Position: Companies are using Internet to attract new customers and serve existing ones - Brief Article - Statistical Data Included

Lynn Daniel is president of The Daniel Group Ltd., a Charlotte-based management consulting firm. It recently surveyed 99 companies -- 81 based in North Carolina -- about their use of the Internet. About 79% are privately held, and more than half are at least 20 years old. About 20% had annual sales greater than $200 million. Thirty-one percent had sales of less than $5 million. About 60% sell goods and services to other businesses.

BNC: You found that the main uses for the Internet in your survey group are strengthening customer relationships and finding new customers.

Daniel: One of the reasons they're using it is it's cost-effective. They can reach a lot of customers and potential customers, and they can do it cost-effectively. Among the very satisfied Internet users, they're using customer surveys at almost twice the rate of the rest. I think what they're trying to do is create a two-way loop of communication with those customers so they can get that customer to raise his or her hand when they've got a problem, when the customer wants something, when the customer maybe just wants to talk.

How are they using the Internet to find new customers?

As a support tool. They may be coupling it with direct mail to get new prospects to visit the [Web] site.

A third of the respondents had no plans to take orders over the Internet. Why?

If you're going to do e-commerce, in many cases you have to have a pretty good information infrastructure in place. And this is something that some of these companies do not have. It may not be able to communicate with HTML or some of the other newer technologies. They've got to spend a lot of money internally. I think there's another reason, and that's preference of the customer. A lot of these people have a lot that goes along with the tangible product -- a lot of service that's delivered by a sales rep or by a technical person, so they're reluctant to try to do that online. And I think the third reason is what I call social. There's a social dimension that you can't get over the Internet, and it's going to be awhile, maybe never, before you do that.

About 32% say they weren't happy with their company's use of the Internet.

I was surprised at that number.

That it was so high?

Yes. A suspicion I have is, when you look at their reason for using the Internet, they come at this with a weaker market position than the companies who rated themselves as very satisfied with their use. So my hypothesis is maybe they have too...