Software as an employee who asks for less than the current minimum
The purpose of modern business software in a company should be more than mere accounting registration of a transaction. However, many companies are not used to the concept yet and prefer to conduct all work processes manually.
The increase in efficiency depends on software or the lack thereof. Modern business software should be selected based on whether it can offer the company reasonable added value, such as the optimisation of inventory, automatic management of customer communication, or flexible integration with new sales channels, including online shops. If the software does not offer such and many other added values, the plan to purchase it should be abandoned and a solution must be found which would earn profit to the owner by way of using automatic algorithms.
Know your customer, recommendations, related products
The basis for earning profit in any sales activity is knowing your customer’s wishes, needs, and purchase history. Being in possession of the relevant information, a company can stock up on the goods customers prefer, offer customers follow-up products, replacement products, or accessories, and keep fulfilling the wishes of customers through product life cycles.
By having an active customer CRM module at the cashier, the software enables to display recently purchased products, the number of visits, earlier purchase wishes, and birthday campaign information. This immediately provides a less experienced employee with the necessary information regarding the status of the customer and makes it easy to provide the best service. The modern customer screen displays not only product and discount information but also receives the customer’s e-mail address or code in order to identify the customer more conveniently.
Modern business software enables to collect and analyse a sufficient amount of customer data.
Data verification, permission verification, activity restrictions, service level
The greatest asset of a company, besides their employees, is data. It may seem that the data in the personal computer of the manager is safely protected. However, that is not the case. In addition to the theft, destruction or leakage of data, it can also be undesirably altered and the activity of the company may come to a sudden halt due to data processing failure.
Security is after all provided through conscious action, such as the use of a firewall to protect data, separation of data in a quality database server, having a backup copy of the database, or better yet, a competent team administering the servers who restore the replica in real time. There is a plan which is used to restore the situation in case of failure. All this is the minimum level provided by a good software service.
Good software allows to flexibly and in a detailed way give employees the rights to add, alter, or delete data. An automatic log is kept for all activities. In addition, there is the option to create separate user accounts for different online shops or b2b environment. Such tools ensure sufficient auditability and thus the protection of a company’s data.
Reduction of errors, improvement of working procedure
The main factors reducing efficiency involve the occurrence of errors and lack of quality information. In general, software should not allow to sell goods below the cost price, systematically create a negative warehouse balance, or give unreasonable discounts to a customer. In terms of warehouse management, software should provide information in the correct sequence regarding the picking order of consignments to be shipped, also immediately print out goods be redirected in order to ensure a smooth workflow.
Cloud-based business software is more profitable
Aside from greater security, cloud-based software allows to reduce current IT costs – no need for an IT guy and the amortisation of your servers. Such savings could greatly exceed the monthly cost of the service. The amount of savings can reach thousands of euros per year if we add automatic updates to the package, for which typical software charge extra, or replace the existing system of calling up a consultant with the always available customer support. And all this by just using the suitable software modules in the necessary volume and with the option of increasing or reducing resources, if necessary. In case of cloud ERP, the integration of an online shop often involves just creating a new user account, since the other prerequisites are already included in the platform (API access, etc.).
Future – chat and e-mail robots?
How often do you fail to ask feedback from a customer? Or does a sales consultant have the time and patience to ask a customer for confirmation to an offer for the third time? Such relatively routine tasks can be very easily assigned to chat robots – a company needs to describe their automatic communication activities only once and the system will then start to automatically perform them. For example, a message is sent to the customer after each offer, asking whether they received it, are satisfied with the offer, or need some more time to think it over. Such requests for information do not require too much time spent on thinking and waiting, and prevent jumping to conclusions regarding the customer’s purchase wish. The sales consultant is also spared from writing uncomfortable e-mails and can focus on offering the customers quality solutions. Similar automations can be applied to accounts receivable or to contracts which need to be extended. In case the customer has not purchased any products or services for a while, the software detects it and will inform the customer administrator as well as the customer, if necessary – this ensures the maintenance of the existing customer base.
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