Chapter 26: Web In Focus

We were in Freddie's club, expecting a dozen or so clients to turn up. I wanted to give them a briefing on the new web services to get some feed-back.

I had a good session with Clegg before the clients turned up. We'd run through the arrangements for the day and he seemed very happy with the plans. "I like this idea of getting feed-back from the clients," he said. "We could spend a lot of money without having a solid foundation, otherwise."

I thought I'd take the opportunity to raise one of my concerns. "You're right," I said. "I really want to find a way of getting better insights into the client's minds to help strengthen the account management approach alongside this. It's a big problem — I just suspect that it's one of those areas where they won't realise if you're doing a good job but they'll soon complain if you're doing a bad one."

"Hmm, maybe," said Clegg. "Of course some of the merchandise must get a pretty good insight into their owners over time. Only problem is we don't see many of them back through our hands. And I draw the line at kidnapping our client's property! Still if you have another idea, let me know. Things seem to be going the right way and we need to make sure that we keep this on track." We broke off our conversation as the first of the clients started to appear. Clegg was at his best greeting them, sliding from one to another, making all feel equally valued. Eventually all twelve had arrived and we got them sat down in the presentation area. Some of our clients were travelling with slaves and had brought them along. I wasn't keen that the slaves heard what we had to say so we'd come up with the idea of allowing them to remain but having them ear-plugged and hooded, We'd provided the hoods as the clients arrived; soft black leather to cover the eyes, the ears and the back of the head, back laced to allow for long hair. The hoods left the mouth free — we knew that many of the clients would have their slaves gagged anyway. Each hood carried a Clegg Enterprises logo worked into the buckle of the strap that ran around the slave's neck to keep the hood in place. A nice memento, I thought.

"Good morning, ladies & gentlemen, welcome to the club here and thank you for coming along today," Freddie said, greeting the clients we had invited to preview the efforts of Sebastian's team. I was pleased that he felt ready to front it; it was all a bit of an innovation after all. He'd been happy to invite folk too, putting a squeeze on them to free up some time in their busy lives. "I know you have all been interested to learn what we have been doing to improve our sales approach, so I am very happy to introduce our Marketing Director, Larry Ross. Some of you I know have met Larry all ready and I hope you'll agree with me that he's bringing a whole lot of valuable new ideas to Clegg Enterprises, ideas that I think you'll find interesting. We've asked you here today to preview a new service that we are about to launch. We've spoken to people about different parts of it but this is the first time any of our clients have had the chance to see the whole thing in action. We are really anxious to get your feed-back on this. I can't stress enough how much we want to fit this service to what our clients want, so please be as open as you like on what we have done. Still, enough from me. Here's Larry."

Clegg sat down to polite applause and I took the stage. We'd agreed to make the whole presentation very factual, very professional. Brian had wanted us to field some of his latest acquisitions as evidence of what we could do but I didn't want anything that would detract from the systems. Fortunately Freddie had agreed with me. I looked out at the audience. They looked as though they were ready to give us a hearing at least. At the back of the room four hooded women stood, shackled and silent.

I started off with a short presentation summarising some of the things that I felt we'd not been good at previously, particularly the whole thing around not responding to customer needs. I gave them a short case study on the way we were becoming more interactive; using the project that we'd done for the Kalinin's son. If nothing else I thought it might help drum up some more custom acquisition work that way and some of them might see the value of putting enough business our way to warrant becoming an account managed client. They seemed quietly impressed. I went on. "The real purpose of today, though, is to show you the proposed web service. This will be available to all of our clients and I think it offers many features that you will find useful and that aren't offered by any of our competitors. It's got three main aims; to help our customer select potential acquisitions, to track any projects that you might engage us for and to participate in auctions without having to trek up to our sales centre. Of course you'll still be welcome if you want to come in person but we believe that many of our clients are busy people and find it increasingly difficult to justify the time to visit auctions unless there is a very special item available."

I could see that the audience was still interested but I felt that if I didn't get down to the nitty-gritty pretty quickly they would start to get restless. I'd arranged for a PC to be hooked up to a projector. One of Sebastian's team of young ladies was back stage pressing the buttons. I talked them through the features of the system. The News and Catalogue areas were greeted with luke-warm enthusiasm, although there was some interest at some of the items of stock on display. Attention picked up though when I started to explain the "My Projects" area and interest turned to enthusiasm as I began to run through the "Search & Snatch" service. By the time I asked for questions at the end most of the audience were looking keen.

Inevitably at such an event there were few questions in the open forum, most people wanted to talk one-to-one. Clegg, Sebastian, Harry and Brian were all on hand to chat people through what we were aiming to do. Clegg had got the club to lay on some drinks and snacks. It was a novelty to be served by women that weren't chained and gagged. We'd got an information pack together for each of the attendees with a security fob that gave access to the service and a set of simple instructions. We'd also included a discount offer for the first live auction that we had planned for later that month. I'd figured that anything we offered off the top would be offset by higher prices resulting from more bidders, so the whole thing should be self funding. Clegg had agreed — he liked the idea of giveaways that didn't cost anything. Brian had just seemed disagreeable about the whole thing. Just to make the most of it I'd arranged with Rick to have five of the auction lots shipped down and put on display in cages in the room where we were serving the drinks. They weren't very far on in Orientation yet so we'd had to make sure they were well shackled. Even so some of them were trying to rattle the bars in protest at being put on show. I was pleased by how quiet Rick had managed to keep them. He'd shown me a new gag that some of the guys in technical had been working on; a heavy leather, padded face piece coupled with a mouth filling plug stuffed with a gel that expanded slightly as it warmed. That way the plug swelled up once it was pushed into the slaves mouth. Small tubes allowed cold water to be run through the gel to shrink it when the gag needed to be removed. It wasn't pretty but at least it let us talk to our guests without too much disturbance from the exhibits and some of them were expressing interest in the gags as much as in the women that were wearing them. I made a mental note to think about whether Clegg Enterprises should consider going into the business of branded restraints.