21st
Century Business – Hand Your Tasks Over to the
Web with Web Services
Want
to know how to put more of your revenue in your pocket AND free
up time to do the important things for your business? All business
owners can save time and money if they properly leverage the Web
through Web services. What I am referring to is replacing recurring
tasks that take employee time to accomplish with web-based services
that do it automatically.
If you are a
small business owner, you probably do many day-to-day tasks that
take up a lot of your valuable time. Your time is better spent doing
the things you’re in business for than regularly completing
every little business administration chore. A common complaint I
hear among small business owners is that they spend too much of
their time on “business” issues like accounting or mailings
instead of the “fun stuff” that their expertise is in.
Now you can
have it both ways, thanks to the Web and the strength of Web services.
The idea is that if you shift your time or employee time away from
tasks that can be accomplished via the Web, the newly saved time
can be spent in more productive and lucrative ways.
I can give numerous
examples of Web services for any industry, but for the sake of brevity,
I will offer a few that will hopefully stimulate your own creativity.
1) Pricing
Do you have
prices on your Web site that need to get updated regularly? If you
have many products, and a price list that changes sometimes, it
may save employee time by putting all the prices in a database (if
they aren’t already) and making your Web site dynamically
database driven to pull the pricing out of the database in real-time
so the pricing on your site is always current.
This saves time
in a number of ways. First, if a particular price is listed in a
number of areas on your site, than you have to pay someone to make
the update in each place every time the price is changed, or spend
your time doing this. Maybe your pricing stays the same most of
the time, but what about when you run specials and discounts?
Another way
this helps is that your entire company can now refer to the Web
to get the most updated pricing. Let’s say you run a special
and decrease the price of a product. Do you contact all your sales
people and tell them about the discount? Do you print out a copy
of the updated price list and send it to everyone who deals with
customers? By making this a Web service, you would simply change
one entry in your database and refer everyone to the Web to get
the current price. Any company information that regularly changes
and you spend time disseminating ought to be automated using the
Web.
2) Sales
& Marketing Web Services
Let’s
say a typical sale, whether it’s done by you or your salespeople,
takes fifteen minutes to close (when speaking to an interested or
‘hot’ lead). Let’s also say that half of the fifteen
minutes is spent explaining what your product or service is or how
it can help improve their lives. You find that you repeat the same
basic selling points over and over again. What if you could create
a Flash presentation that does this for you? The presentation could
be loaded on your Web site and linked on your home page. You could
refer people to this presentation and cut your sales pitch in half.
You don’t
even necessarily need to be so sophisticated. Simple html, images,
and good writing could do this job as well. Software companies can
really benefit from this tactic. Screen shots of their software,
with descriptions of how their product benefits the customer, put
together in an attractive presentation can act like a sales person
who never sleeps or takes a break.
3) Required
Customer Information
Do you or your
employees spend time asking each new client their particular specifications
for a job? Is there a set of questions you ask every customer in
order to fulfill their request and complete the project? Consider
creating an html form that asks these questions, have the answers
emailed directly to your inbox, and place the form on your Web site.
A catering company may have a standard set of questions they ask
a bride and groom that could be automated and put on the caterer’s
Web site. This could save the caterers valuable time, freeing them
up to party plan and cook, which is probably why they got in the
business in the first place.
4) Partnering
Do you have
business partners? Do you waste a lot of time sending out mail to
each partner when you have something to communicate? Do you want
to entice other businesses to partner with you but don’t have
a good incentive? Creating a simple password protected area of your
Web site that only current partners can access may be the answer.
If you share
information with partners on a regular basis, this is particularly
useful. It is much easier for an advertising or creative agency
to post work they’re doing for their client to review than
it is to snail mail it or actually meet with the client for each
new draft. A more sophisticated application of this concept involves
hooking your inventory system up to the partner Web site section
where every partner can see what is in stock in real-time.
5) Web
Services for Product or Service Information / Catalogs
If you spend an inordinate amount of time, money and energy snail
mailing catalogs out to potential customers, you may want to consider
recreating your traditional print catalog online and making it easily
accessible on your Web site. This may sound like a simple idea,
and it is, but there are still many companies that haven’t
done this yet. However, taking this mindset a step further could
truly allow you to break away from the pack and free up a lot of
you and your employees’ time.
This is actually
a lot simpler than it sounds. One of the hardest parts is coming
up with possible web service opportunities. Often we are so entrenched
in the old way of doing things that we don’t even see the
possibilities. It is important that you stretch your creativity
when thinking of possible solutions. If you think something could
be done automatically but aren’t sure if it’s possible,
ask around or speak to an expert.
The possibilities
are endless. In the future, many of the tasks of today will be done
by the computer, (this could have been a line in an article written
in the 80’s, and it certainly came true), but now it will
be the networked computer that accomplishes the tasks, in other
words, the Web. I challenge you to get creative and think of ways
to save you and your employees’ time and money by utilizing
the power of the Web and Web services.
Web
Services Article by Jason O'Connor
© 2003
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