Tag: customer services
If you’re a business with an expanding online retail footprint, your hard work actually begins once a customer places an order. Each new order triggers a multifarious chain reaction, right from confirming the order through payment acceptance to picking, packing, and finally shipping the consignment to the right location. As digital shopping becomes the primary buying method today, it’s important for brands to simplify online ordering for their customers.
How can you make your order processing and fulfillment smooth enough for both your customers and employees?
If you’re a small business, you might be able to handle your orders with basic pre-packaged software. But as your business grows, you need a customized order management system to fulfill the orders gushing in. With a custom order processing software, your business can bring the best of both worlds, that is, streamline your order processing and fulfillment and simplify order placement for your customers.
View Infographic: Custom Software vs. Commercial Off-the-shelf Solutions
What is an Order Management Software?
Order management refers to the set of processes used by an organization to track, manage, and fulfill an order, right from the time when it (order) is placed by a customer to when it is safely delivered at the right destination.
Order management systems are software tools used to monitor the end-to-end customer order journey. With order management software, you can organize and automate processes, keep track of your merchandise, control the delivery process, and ensure that your customer receives the right order at the right time in a good condition.
Say you’re running an online medical procurement store. A clinic places an order with you for disposable saliva ejectors. Your order management software checks if the payment was successful, send the order details to your warehouse, tracks the order form when it is being picked, packed, and shipped, and finally ensures that the saliva ejectors were delivered properly.
Modern order management systems are capable of going beyond delivery and order fulfillment. They can record customer service actions, track returns or exchanges, prevent shipping errors and processing delays, and save profits by reducing refunds and reshipping costs. By collecting vital metrics that define your success and efficiency, your business can identify what’s working and what needs to be improved.
Why Do You Need a Customized Order Processing Software?
Investing in an off-the-shelf order processing system is enough if you’re content with your business’s status quo. But it wouldn’t suffice if you’re thinking of expanding your business. Offering personalization is the only way to make yourself stand out from the competition and attract more customers. That means, making some serious changes to your existing workflow. When you try to alter your current workflow to incorporate personalization, your canned software offers limited ways to do it successfully. This is where a custom software solution comes to your rescue.
Watch Video: Why Your Business Requires Custom Software
Custom order management software allows you to configure the workflows required to meet your specific business needs. If off-the-shelf software provides you with 80% of the functionality, custom software allows you to tailor the remaining 20% (or even more) to enhance your workflows and make your business future-proof.
Some Inspiring Stories
We’ve done it in the past and we’re doing it now as well!
We’ve simplified what was once considered complex order processing, with custom-built ordering software that lets customers place orders quickly and allows businesses to track every order with improved efficiency and sophistication. Here’re a few inspiring stories.
1. Cheetah Transportation Systems
Texas-based Cheetah Transportation Systems leveraged Fingent’s custom software development services to implement a personalized transportation management system. The new system allows Cheetah’s customers to view their order status in real-time and access up-to-date shipping data. With a customized software solution, Cheetah re-imagined their logistics and supply chain operations:
- Streamlined and accelerated ordering, tracking, and delivery processes
- Cut licensing and subscription costs by eliminating complex third-party software integrations
- 30% improvement in Turn Around Time (TAT)
- 40% time-saving attained through automated tasks and real-time reporting
2. AEC Advisors
Another pretty interesting digital transformation story is that of AEC Advisors. The New York-based investment banking and corporate finance advisory firm experienced a business transformation with a customized survey management cum analytics and reporting software developed by Fingent.
- Ability to create and circulate customized surveys prior to the yearly conference held by AEC Advisors
- Quickly generate KPI reports based on survey responses
- Secure, scalable, and flexible IT architecture to address AEC’s specific needs
- Make it convenient for AEC’s clients to securely share complex financial information
3. Lakeside Cabins
A custom order management application for a manufacturer who builds customized sheds for growing families needing more space! That’s the story of Lakeside Cabins, headquartered in Ohio. The manufacturer wanted us to build an in-house software customized to support the different stages of their building processes. Fingent created a personalized, flexible, easy-to-maintain, and scalable order management software with the following features:
- Custom-built 3D configurator that allows customers to configure building designs, generate floor plans and invoices, and reduce human errors
- Integrated modules to manage CRM, dealers, orders, purchase orders, work orders, and route-optimized delivery schedules
Interested to explore similar success stories? Click here to read our top case studies.
Business Benefits of Custom Order Management Software
1. Features that fit your business needs
A customized order management software offers the best features your business would actually require. Collaborate with the right software development partner to identify your unique business needs. Avoiding unwanted features helps you get cost-effective custom software within a shorter development cycle.
2. Flexibility
Your customers may want to split orders and deliver them to multiple addresses. Using an off-the-shelf software to split your shipments will increase your fulfillment costs due to longer development cycles. A customized order processing software offers the flexibility to split consignments, choose multiple payment modes for a single order, and a horde of other capabilities that will enable you to deliver an Amazon-like experience to your customers.
Read more: Custom software solutions – the ideal way to build business apps
3. Easy to integrate with other tools
Most off-the-shelf software don’t offer flexibility in integration, making you spend more on missing software integrations. In contrast, custom order processing software offers makes it easy to integrate with necessary third-party ware that can improve the accuracy of your order fulfillment process. Fingent develops powerful APIs and plugins that support seamless integration of third-party tools with your custom software.
4. Automation of mundane tasks
When your custom order management software does the heavy-lifting by automating invoicing, billing, banking integration, payment, and stock management, you can focus on improving your customer service. Automating mind-numbing operations will allow you to keep your order processing tasks much more organized and easier.
5. Flexible pricing
Most pre-packaged order management solutions offer functionalities that your business doesn’t require and demand you to pay extra for useful features. A custom software solution is designed and developed after defining your objectives clearly. So you end up paying only for the features you use.
Read more: Know What’s Driving Custom Software Development Costs in 2022
Develop Your Custom Software Application with Fingent
When you’re in complete control of your order management system, you will attain better visibility, productivity, and cost control. Custom software befits businesses of any size- small or large, as it can save your costs and support your long-term growth plans. Whether your requirement is to develop a custom inventory/ order/ warehouse/ transportation management software, our developers have considerable experience in handling anything that comes our way.
Read more: How to Choose the Right Custom Software Development Firm
Our core experience in developing B2B e-commerce applications, customized product ordering systems, tailored self-service payment portals, and an array of bespoke software solutions makes us a trusted software development partner to hundreds of organizations worldwide, including Fortune 500 companies.
If you want to learn more about custom software or would like to know how it can improve your bottom line, get in touch with us.
Chatbot or Chatbaby: Why Chatbot Technology Needs Time To Mature?
Automation is at its height in this digital era and artificial intelligence is the core technology behind successful industries today. A chatbot is a computer program that interacts with human users via the Internet. These auto-operating conversational bots, artificially replicate the patterns of human interaction. This is made possible via Machine Learning algorithms.
Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri are well-known examples of chatbots. They respond to queries based on the data they are provided with. Since a chatbot is programmed to perform tasks independently, it can respond to queries based on predefined scripts and machine learning applications as well.
Enterprises that have enhanced IT infrastructure, implement chatbots in varying departments. For instance, ERP, on-premises to cloud, etc., improve customer experiences and increase business value.
Chatbots As Conversational Tools In The Workplace
The potential benefits that chatbots provide to companies are immense. On one hand, when chatbots provide personalized and efficient search results, on the other hand, companies find cost savings a prominent feature on implementing chatbots.
Enterprises enhance their workflows and operations increasingly with the help of chatbots as co-workers. This helps companies in serving a larger market segment. Chatbots automate redundant tasks that sap the productivity and efficiency of the workforce and enable them to focus on their core functions. Chatbot technology enhances customer experience by providing them with personalized content.
Chatbots: Influence In Industries Today
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Enhances Customer Service
According to a recent survey, 83% of customers need online assistance to complete their shopping. Customers will need online real-time assistance from a real store. The assistance required by customers include areas like during registration, logging in, adding products into the cart, payment, checkout, etc. This is where chatbots serve as a salesperson by interactively communicating with customers via text, voice and so on and provide them with rich content.
Additionally, chatbots provide automated answers to redundant queries of customers. It also forwards the queries to real sales personnel when the need arises. This saves the time of human customer service resources, avoiding the need for customers to wait for responses. This scales up operations of enterprises to new markets globally as well.
Customer service that chatbots offer is proactive. This means that chatbots facilitate a 24/7 service for interacting with its customers real-time. Initiating communication with the customer periodically, is another benefit of the prevailing chatbot technology, thus enhancing your brand perception considerably.
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Monitors Data To Provide Critical Insights
An enterprise benefits from gaining traction of customers on its website’s landing page. But it is equally important to ensure that the landing page also generates enough organic traffic. Chatbots reaches out to the customers who visit the landing page and gathers critical data as to why the customer left the page without a purchase and so on.
Online customer behavior and buying patterns are tracked effectively via monitoring the data thus derived.
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Generate Leads Effectively
Chatbots ensure a better lead generation by helping in determining leads via KPIs such as timeline, budget, etc. Chatbots thus ensure higher conversion rates.
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Saves Costs
Implementation of a fully functioning chatbot is much faster than hiring individual employees for each task. With great speed, chatbots also ensure error-free operations. It is also easy to implement and maintain. This reduces costs and other overheads significantly.
Related Reading: Read on to reveal the top Chatbot Security measures you need to consider.
Chatbots In Its Chatbaby Phase: Conversational Limitations In Current Chatbots
Chatbots have evolved into a phase where it can integrate Natural Language Processing or NLP technology to support the workforce in performing extensive searches. That being said, chatbots currently face a limitation. AI-based chatbots, for instance, are restricted to duplicate results. For example, a flaw in a chatbot can result in the chatbot responding to a high engagement level content such as an office party album instead of retrieving business-related documents.
Related Reading: Can ChatBots redefine your real estate business? Read on to know more!
Why Do Chatbots Need To Mature?
Though chatbots support customer services, they lack a human element in them. A full-fledged implementation of a matured chatbot requires addressing numerous technological gaps. Only then the services of these chatbots can be extended from a chatbaby level, offering just employee assistance to a serious enterprise level.
Even when chatbots interact in an automated manner, they sometimes cannot answer even simple queries. For instance, chatbots lack becoming conversational in a detail-oriented manner. Thus, it is necessary to learn the complex machine learning technology and its bottlenecks initially before you proceed to implement it in your business.
Around-the-clock support is what customers look forward to while they search via queries online. This 24/7 ability to converse with the customers real-time is what is yet to be achieved.
In 2019, chatbots are still in their chatbaby phase and need to mature. 75% of global consumers prefer human interaction rather than a chatbot or any other automated service at the time being.
The data required to establish a fully conversational chatbot is immensely huge. This explains the need for a much higher understanding of machine learning and challenges around natural language processing technique implementation.
Can There Be An Alternative To Chatbots?
Chatbots can handle simple tasks to help the human workforce. But when it comes to complicated tasks, assistants that can proactively work to streamline interactions with customers, are required. For this, employees must be able to access from a centralized location.
Employee Intranets, for instance, are hubs that allow organizations to access data in real-time and whenever required. This not only allows them to store data in an easily accessible manner, but also help in connecting with resources and tools at a fast pace. This now becomes a perfect collaboration system.
As more and more employees become tech-savvy and with the growing requirement of companies to expand their mobile technologies and strategies, connecting remotely is a necessity. With the growing remote working, it is important to implement social media features into various communication channels as well. This enables a human element to be present and can act as an alternative to chatbots.
2019 can be seen as a year to understand machine learning technology and to develop the digital workplace. With evolving technology, it is also important that an organization ensures a perfect environment where resources and tools support these digital assistants and help in making critical data simple and accessible. Call our strategists right away to learn more about how chatbots can improve your business effectively and productively.