Companies face a range of challenges today, what with the speed of doing business escalating and fickle customers who are becoming more and more demanding. But looking after your customers is vital - as they are especially key to the continued survival of any business.
Ignore your customers at your peril, says Mark Ehmke, managing director of Staffware South Africa. "It is possible to obtain a competitive-edge for your business through simply caring for your customers."
One way of doing this is by implementing a workflow solution to help deliver real and tangible business benefits, particularly for e-commerce initiatives.
"Workflow software has become a key pillar in business success," says Ehmke. "Although some Internet companies are losing billions, it`s not because e-business is a lost cause, but rather it`s about how workflow was implemented and the tools and infrastructure that are used to underpin any e-commerce undertaking.
"There are two messages in the e-business market. The one is that 75% of all e-businesses fail, according to Gartner Group. Secondly, of workflow projects, 90% are successful.
"Why? E-business makes business operations very transparent for both customers and staff, so there is nowhere to hide," he continues. "This means there`s no time to be reticent about back office systems and customer service. You have to be bold in order to gain competitive advantage. If you`re not there for your customer, your competitor will be."
Companies that excel specifically in customer service are companies that are most likely to have a sterling future. Also, those who get closer to their customers and use technology as an aid will carve out their competitive advantage. When customers experience immediate and good service, they are less likely to move to competitors. Simple methods can improve customer service, such as sending field sales staff out to visit customers armed with WAP-enabled phones, which can link back into automated processes. This speeds up the delivery of orders and cuts back on business administration costs.
"Once customers experience improved service, they are more likely to spend and stay with that particular company and reduce the likelihood of churn," Ehmke says. "The current WAP technologies are well-suited to approving simple workflow processes, especially since these are not data-intensive."
Ultimately, workflow has an important role to play in forging closer relationships between businesses and their customers. With a workflow system, it is possible to create a consistent customer experience by ensuring that customer requests are quickly and efficiently managed, tracked and fulfilled, regardless of delivery channel.
There are a number of things that Ehmke believes customers require from their suppliers, all of which have implications for workflow systems.
These include:
- A single point of contact - when customers contact a company, they want to be able to address all of their immediate needs through a single point of contact.
- Knowledgeable - when dealing with a supplier, they want the customer interface (whether it`s the Web or person-to-person) to know them intimately, including information about existing transactions, preferences, and their needs.
- Convenience - to be able to contact a product or service provider any time, any place, regardless of how and when they choose.
- Total service - customers expect complete management of their order from the initial request to the fulfilment of a product or service.
- Track progress - all requests must be quickly and effectively managed, tracked and fulfilled from end to end. Customers expect their supplier to be proactive, not reactive. In order to meet these challenges, an increasing number of companies are implementing Web portals, call centres and customer relationship management strategies to enhance the efficiency of their operations, increase sales and offer a higher level of customer care to set them apart.
"Workflow has been described as the missing link in e-commerce," says Ehmke. "It ensures the smooth flow of information and ability of a company to process real-time transactions through the company infrastructure.
"By adopting workflow into an e-commerce environment, each individual business procedure or transaction, however disparate, becomes part of an overall chain of ordered events, and is automatically placed in its appropriate context within the organisation."
Ehmke points out what while companies across the globe are spending millions on developing e-commerce projects, many of them have found that their initial objectives or reducing costs while increasing productivity have not been achieved. This is often because process automation is either not in place, or does not run through the entire line of necessary actions required in order to fulfil an operational request.
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