Online businesses have heavy competition, which makes it necessary to stand out from the crowd. With nearly a quarter of retail purchases happening online and expected to grow, that growth has the potential to create many new challenges. As technology has evolved, it has provided key ways for businesses to enhance workflows and return focus on building the business.
1. Automate Customer Service and Feedback
While the customer always comes first, an online business often deals with many inquiries at one time. Unlike a brick-and-mortar building with a handful of shoppers at a time, an online business can get inundated with questions, complaints and feedback. All of that information serves a vital role in making a business the best it can be.
Many businesses have seen the benefits of automating these processes. Automation tools enable customers to get a base level of support regardless of the time of day or day of the week. For businesses that deal with overseas customers, that ability to address questions and concerns quickly becomes even more important. Using chatbots or autoresponders lets a business deal with basic questions while elevating more serious, complex concerns to a customer service representative.
For any company to grow and meet customer needs, it needs to pay attention to customer feedback. Automating this process provides better insight and more details, helping a business make better decisions. Many of these processes have tools that allow a business to easily create a poll or survey without having to spend precious time making it happen.
2. Harness Metrics With Distributed Tracing
Supply chain issues remain a top concern for online businesses. Having a pulse on inventory, knowing where problems exist and creating solutions to avoid those problems all have a powerful impact on the success of a company. Many businesses may wonder what is distributed tracing and how it can assist in ensuring smooth workflows.
In essence, this software observes and monitors service requests in applications that use microservices architecture. For a business, that means the ability to track a transaction or request at any point in the process. The moment a request starts getting tracked, a business gets vital data. In this day and age, data means everything.
This technology delivers data imperative to a business, both in operations and regarding customers. If a customer deals with a laggy system or cannot access certain pages on the website, this information gets collected to ensure a quick resolution. Distributed tracing can also track a customer’s behavior, such as how long it takes to make a purchase.
3. Upgrade Vendor Onboarding Methods
Regardless of the type of business, they all work with some type of vendor or vendor. When a company relies on vendors for needed materials, goods and other services, it needs to ensure that it uses the best available. Unfortunately, finding the best vendors often requires time and patience. If a company has multiple vendors, it also creates challenges in keeping them organized and standardized.
Success in the future means making onboarding vendors now essential. New software available turns that once tedious into a more simple, consolidated and optimized process in one application. This software enables the creation of contract templates that ease negotiations and clearly state the quality a business expects.
Along with providing a layer of legal protection in the case of an untrustworthy vendor, this type of software assists in registering vendors. Instead of relying on manual methods, a vendor can fill out an online registration and submit it. With a click of a button, a business can set up parameters for automatic rejection or approval, as well as set up reminders for contract renewals.
The world has evolved, making online businesses a vital component of how people live. Staying ahead of the game and delivering quality service comes with challenges. Luckily, businesses have a plethora of technologies at their fingertips that can create data-driven workflows to enable smooth processes and happy customers.
