The Best Customer Order Management Strategies for Your Business

Order_management_system_2-1If you are like most business owners today, you know that the effort it takes to fulfill customer orders can be challenging and time consuming. You can meet these challenges head on by employing order management strategies that will save you both time and money.

Improve the Efficiency of Your Business With These Strategies

  • Having the right order management software is essential. When researching, it is a good idea to evaluate the features that are offered and compare them with the unique needs of both your customers and your business. Whenever possible, choose software that streamlines the entire ordering process in order to increase efficiency. Finding software that integrates with QuickBooks and your warehouse can reduce the risk of time consuming, costly errors.  Find software that enables customers to look up product availability and pricing, and place orders themselves.  The order then gets sent right to the warehouse where the customer can track it themselves. 
  • Automation is key when fulfilling orders. Since errors and miscommunication often occur when human input is involved, not to mention the fact that manual data entry is much more time consuming, the more your order management process is automated, the more accurate and efficient your system will be. Consider selecting an online platform that enables seamless automation and allows your sales team and management personnel to have complete interaction as well.
  • Warehouse integration can likely be one of the most important factors in streamlining your customer order management. It is important for your customers and sales team to be able to view real time inventory and product availability in order to place orders effectively, and for those orders to be filled accurately as well. When your order fulfillment process uses order management software that integrates with your back-end system, the information in each will be much more accurate.
  • Regardless of the type of products you sell, you know that fulfillment timing and accuracy can be extremely important in a company's success. Select order management software that enables your customers, your sales team, and management to view order details, the status of orders and track each shipment so that everyone can plan accordingly.
  • One of the most crucial (and time consuming) aspects of order management is billing. Since payment and cash flow is so important, an accurate invoicing process is vital. While you can hire individuals to manually process your invoices, why not save money and purchase order management software that integrates with your QuickBooks database and reduces data entry. Doing so will not only enable your staff to spend their valuable time on more important tasks (like recruiting new customers or building upon existing customer relationships), but it will improve accuracy as well.

Improvement of your customer order management process takes time.  Utilizing strategies laid out above can help both your team and your customers, freeing up more time on both ends.  If you’d like a deeper understanding on how to integrate your order processing with QuickBooks, contact Now Commerce for a demo today.order management system