Good customer service also means being able to recover from poorcustomer service. Mathiva-nan believes it all boils down to how avendor responds during service failures. His word of advice? "If youmake a mistake, make sure you apologise and recover, and your clientwill trust you more, because no one expects you to be 100 percentinfallible."

Operating a credible ASP not only means getting customer serviceright. It means getting technology in tip-top shape, and knowing thecustomer's business well enough to prescribe the right technologysolutions. Crimson-Logic recently standardised on a J2EE (Java 2Enterprise Edition)-based architecture just so that its people couldbe deployed flexibly to service different verticalindustries.

IT Worked

Sony Logistics Singapore's managing director Mitsuo Tanikawa secondsMathivanan's notion that the right ASP can do an IT job morecritically and cheaply. Sony Logistics is using CrimsonLogic's ASPservice, eTrade-Xchange, to streamline its trade documentationprocess.

"We felt there was a need to streamline our trade documentationoperations and engaged CrimsonLogic to provide us with an appropriatesolution that is customised to fit our in-house processes," saysTanikawa.