Manufacturing, wholesaling, and distribution companies all have similar requirements in their order process. These companies use internal and external sales people to build long-term relationships with B2B customers, manage customer inquiries, and customer information.
For these businesses, finding a great sales and order processing system to help your employees and customers is crucial. Customer order software delivers specific functionality to B2B companies looking to increase customer service while decreasing administrative costs. Finding customer order software that will integrate with your accounting software like QuickBooks, will allow you to expand your reach with your customers.
The following are several areas where a business may utilize the functionality of ordering software with the relationship building functions core to any B2B model.
Customize Order Entry Forms
Information collected from customers differs depending upon industry, need, and relationship. Rather than use one order form for every customer, utilize custom order forms to deliver the right information for your customers.
Customized order forms enable sales people to engage customers proactively using your website as a sales management tool and avoiding the errors caused by paper order forms being manually entered into sales systems.
Rather than wrong product numbers, improperly entered physical addresses or other typos, a custom online form gives sales people the tools to make ordering quick, painless and error free.
Train Customer Service to Work with Sales Teams
With traditional methods of order collection, the information available to sales people on the field and customer service representatives answering the phone differs significantly. This difference has two causes. The sales people collect information without entering it into the computer system and the customer service representatives have access in the computer system to information that might not have come from a sales person.
A customer order processing system reduces loss of information from both these sources. With proper training on the system for both service representatives and sales people, communication and quality of service will increase.
Offer Training to Biggest Customers on Portals
Managing recurring orders through a customer's purchasing department to your sales people, to your accounting department, and to your inventory management or manufacturing department contains too many steps. For recurring orders from your largest customers, free up your sales team's time by giving customers the capability to manage their own orders through the order processing portal.
Additionally, customers use the order processing software to track sales orders from processing to shipping. This tracking ability enables sales people to approach the customer on the same page regarding where previous work is at. Rather than being blindsided by problems with inventory that the customer brings up, the sales person and the customer will be on the exact same page regarding the order.
Automate Quality and Data Management
The costs of data management are increased through poor quality controls on human activities like order processing, on relationship issues arising with customer's orders, and through poor inventory tracking and communication with customers.
Great customer ordering software enables businesses to turn over control of inventory and shipping to the customers, to empower accurate communication by the sales team, and bridge the gap between customer service and sales.
From order processing to data management, customer order software automates key aspects of the sales process and integrates it with the most important determiner of quality in your business: your customer.