Sometimes there's just no substitute for good old-fashioned communication.

Just ask Adrienne Lumpkin. She'll tell you customer relationships were key to the success of Alternate Access, the Raleigh, North Carolina-based computer telephone firm she and Kelly Lumpkin started at their dinner table one night in 1993. "Once you make a sale, it's the beginning of a relationship, not the end," Adrienne explains.

And while cultivating relationships isn't a top priority for all businesses, Adrienne knows that for a company like Alternate Access, which focuses on telephony customization, it's essential. "Sometimes it's hard to shut up and hear what your customers' needs are," admits Adrienne. "But I want to make sure that my customers tell me what they need instead of telling my competitor."

Case in point: the North Carolina Board of Nursing. Its first contact with Alternate Access was more than three years ago, when Alternate Access developed a call-handling application to manage 90 percent of the calls that came through on the board's busy phone lines. "We developed a system that handled 4,000 calls in the first two weeks it was deployed," Adrienne says.