Continuing from the last post – “A Beautiful Website Only Lasts for 30 Seconds “…
Would you agree that you want to have continuous business? Either the customer keeps buying from you and refer more customers to you?
Then, your business will need to focus on the following – Marketing, Customer Service and Customer Experience. Also known as RPAs or Revenue Producing Activities.
It is all about your customers. Without them, your business have no meaning to exist in the first place.
Therefore, the next level of websites would be the Website-Office Integration (WOI) model.
An automated website fully integrated to the back-end systems with capabilities of sharing information between the office systems for processing.
Since offices are the back-end fulfillment centers for any businesses, higher efficiency of office and higher usability of website can be achieved simultaneously by integrating both the website and office system together to create a better Customer Experience in total.
Some of the applications commonly found in back-end office systems are like accounting, inventory, sales and billing, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and more. However, the main focus for the integration is on the systems that shares information with customers, mainly sales and billing and CRM.
In order to have a usable website, yours must allow the visitors, customers, vendors, staffs, etc to interact with your company via the website.
And it should be easy enough to be used just like email; otherwise, it will be like a housewife trying to fly an airplane.
Once the systems are integrated, it would be easy to keep track and monitor the activities of the website and the status of communication between different parties and more.
This will enable companies to be highly responsive and adaptable to market changes. The outcome is highest efficiency and profitability and the market have higher perceived value of quality service from the company.
The Challenges of Integrated Systems
In most cases, business systems are available as separate applications. They may be integrated or not at all depending on the capability of the software.
However, as more applications are being used within the same office, things can get pretty messy especially maintaining several disparate systems. Information may need to be checked and updated manually on each application to maintain consistency of processing and thus creates overhead and bottleneck for the system, not to mention the costs involved.
It would be an ideal solution for single software to take care of the mission critical operations.
The Good News Is…
There are ready-made solutions available in the market that offers good back-end processing with options to integrate or connectivity from other systems.
The important point is to have one, not two, one integrated systems for the office core applications and integrate with the web systems in order for it to work. You would not want to spend time on integrating core office applications as this is not a RPA (Revenue Producing Activity).
The list of applications considered core to the office:
- Sales Application for Quotation, Sales Order, Renewals
- Inventory Application to keep track of stocks
- Billing Application to handle Cash Sales, Invoices, Adjustments, Cancellations, etc
- Purchasing Application for Supplier Quotes, Purchase Order, etc
- Payables and Receivables Application to keep track of billing
Here you are, a summary of what you will need to ensure the business operations run smoothly and allow more time to focus on more RPAs.
Have a nice day!
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