Have you ever thought about the amount of time spent advising clients when their order/job/project will be completed, when their it will be fulfilled or simply the status of enquiries that they may have faxed to you?

Often valuable time is spent by your staff on the phone advising them of simple information. Replacing this with some online system 'smarts' and they can investigate themselves - saving you time & money.

One of the ways that this can be achieved is with the development of an online job management process that enables your clients to request work or products directly from your website. This can either be a purpose built application designed specifically for clients to use by logging into your website only, or it can be a system that is integrated into your own internal business processes.

With such a system clients can log into their area of your website to review the status of their orders and all other relevant information in relation to the delivery of your product or service. This area can be personalised with greetings and messages from you, enabling you to also communicate more effectively with your clients.

For regional businesses, this has some great opportunities as your clients can be geographically spread over many areas, so the opportunity for face-to-face communication can be limited. By creating a personalised client area at your website, you can bring them into your business, enabling them to keep track of their orders in their own time and freeing up your staff so that they can complete the jobs rather than providing updates.

We recently deployed such as system for a client with an export arm of their business including an online client management area within their website. It is proving to be an invaluable tool for them. Their clients are able to log in and monitor their orders in their own time zone without the need to contact Australia at 3 in the morning! Obviously though, normal communication channels may still need to operate (because face to face may still be required in some instances), however this can be vastly reduced with a quick online update. Order progress, delivery dates, processing details etc provide a very cost effective method of keeping on top of product fulfilment and customer fulfilment.

The essential idea though is to engage your clients in more efficient and cost effective ways, providing them with information about their custom with you in a timely manner and to free up your staff to actually get on with the job of completing the work.

Although this type of application has benefits for business who sell a product it can easily be applied to service providers, for things such as repairs & maintenance, service calls, advertising placements and even project development - such as website developments (yes we use it too!).