The Benefits of eCommerce and Back-Office Integration
The Benefits of eCommerce and Back-Office Integration
It 's astonishing how many companies are still working with separate systems for the front and back offices. Front-office features refer to the design, content, images and features that customers routinely see on a company 's website and Web pages while back-office processes include ERP and CRM software, inventory management, fulfillment processes, accounting and staff management. Back-office integration--along with front-office integration and automation--delivers improved management efficiencies and better customer experiences by giving each website visitor expanded options for researching products, ordering products and services,
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Maintaining minimum inventory counts with automated reordering or staff alerts
Managing partial shipments if customers want them
Generating invoices, marking them paid and emailing them to clients
Adding sales taxes, customs and duties and other surcharges
Applying the correct pricing tier for each customer and honoring custom price quotes
Handling multiple payment options and in-house account billing
Automating recurring orders and integrating these requirements in maintaining inventory
Decreasing administrative costs by increasing the speed of order fulfillment, reducing the need for staff involvement and and ensuring that information only needs to be entered once
Bringing together data from multiple sources to speed custom price quotes and manage custom product configurations
Calculating, printing and mailing statements automatically each month
Empowering customers to change, amend, cancel and return their orders
Integrating online and brick-and-mortar sales
Updating inventory counts from multiple distribution points such as retail sales, outside salespeople, trade shows, distributors and multiple warehouses
Breaking Down
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Many customers can manage their accounts without human intervention, and although many older people consider this appalling, younger generations feel empowered by the ability to manage their accounts 24/7. Even though direct engagement might only occur when there 's a problem, that doesn 't mean that company staff don’t communicate with customers. Emails, text messages, marketing incentives and two-way communications are enhanced by an automated platform. People still communicate in B2B sales; it 's just done differently and more efficiently instead of playing phone tag or leaving messages with harried staff
IT helps manager to reduce inventory and human resource requirement to a competitive level in market.
More proficient item and logistics by needing to put a decent arrangement of time and exertion into reducing so as to make the production and logistics more effective the quantity of creation stages, expanding efficiency, diminishing stock levels and expanding conveyance
Besides, the organization's production network, by following client buys and interest, permits purchasers to adequately force stock to saves as opposed to having the organization push merchandise onto racks (Traub, 2012). Organizations inside the store network synchronize their interest projections under a synergistic arranging, anticipating and renewal plan, and each connection in the chain is joined through engineering that incorporates a focal database, store-level purpose of-offer frameworks and a satellite system.
Since customer satisfaction is very important in this company, Brandon Smith, one of the Vice Presidents at of the branches, said that treating the customers as if they were the “best” is what keeps them coming back for more transactions. He then continued to elaborate that they use a communication method to get to know their customers more. For instance, Bank of America’s customers talk about their financial goals. In addition, Brandon mentioned that his employees’ set many goals to change how customers view the company in a positive way.
The customer support and customer service functions are more than departments; they are part of an essential strategy for growing your business. In the modern business climate, customers expect answers to their questions immediately. When the right information is available anytime, from anywhere in the world, customers are more likely to have a positive experience, thus customer loyalty will be increased. It is a known fact that the cost to obtain a customer is ten times higher than to maintain and keep existing customers. (Gouran, Dennis, W.E. Wiethoff, & J.A. Doelger. (1994). Mastering communication. 2nd ed. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.) Not in Reference Pg.
Worthington, Shari L. S. “Customer-Center Communications: What We Can Learn from B2C.” 01 February 2014.
Reducing risk ; reducing the quantity of manufactured so that reducing burden of stock and burden of frequent discount sales
Another goal is to act like an automated sales force, tracking the customer’s account history for repeated sales then come up with suggestions. Lastly, the heavy use of technology will keep the customer up to date on things such as inventory and tracking information. Technology will also manage growth and demand, especially with seasonal products, like Christmas. By doing so, firms are able to get a transparent forecast of projected sales for certain items.
Walsh (2012), identifies “customer engagement” (p. 11) as a crucial area that often is bypassed. The pitfall of not communicating with the customers can be drastic. Fernley (2012), recommenders placing the customer at the front of the businesses activities and goals which will reflect the value the business places on the customer. By involving the key stakeholder, the customer, the company runs the risk of missing an angle or a point of view that is important (Raymond, 2014).
...reduces time involved in the purchasing process in contrast to preparing purchase orders separately shown in diagram 1.
5. Improve inventory turnover, reduce the cost of goods sold while maintaining the high quality of the products.
Thus, customers can get and receive information from each other instead of communicating to the corporations or the companies and as result they can easily spread information about company products as well as information about new arrivals
As of now, our processes are not as efficient as they ought to be. Management is aware of this challenge and is making steps to change this to ensure high productivity and A-1 customer service. Some include making better use of technology by emailing statements and notices rather than sending them in through the post office which can take a while sometimes and is quite unreliable here in The Bahamas. There are also plans to adopt a new quote system that allows an employee to enter in a few details on the customer and have a quote generated in seconds.
Effective processes enhance customer relations, especially in developing menus, efficient ordering of foods, purchasing food and beverages, facilities planning, and cost control procedures (Lindsay and Evans 46).
The Home Depot Supply Chain Management model is based on integrated inventory management through a centralized network of 20 distribution centers, called Rapid Deployment Centers (RDCs) and three Direct Fulfillment Centers (DFCs) aimed at the e-commerce market (Bond, 2015). Orders are processed and managed to meet current and forecasted demands, sent to the regional RDCs, which service approximately 100 stores each, and sent to retail outlets to meet stock requirements (Bond, 2015). Direct Fulfillment Centers are e-commerce distribution systems. Home Depot delivers within a two-day timeframe to 90% of US based customers, and the system also leverages in store stock for same day pick-up (Bond,