Welcome to Internet Software Sciences Newsletter – #99 -May  2013

Automate your business with Web+Center!

For many business and organizations, there exists a combination of  business functions and process requirements that most ticketing applications cannot handle since they require both a comprehensive solution that is also customizable.

It is not cost effective to have a developer create an entirely new custom application to fit those requirements when Web+Center can be a perfect, out-of-the-box solution that comes with a chest of tools and features that can be easily customized to build your complete solution.  This newsletter describes two basic business requirements and how they are solved with Web+Center.

Business Process 1 – Tracking Widgets/Products/Services with Customers

Many businesses sell or loan a specific widget (hardware, software, equipment, service contract, etc) with a  customer purchase that needs to be carefully tracked.   The customizable asset management component of the Tech+Center application allows organizations to build a database of assets or services that can then be tied to an individual customer or company.    The Business+Center and Tech+Center allows you to create internal notes about your customers and associate them into various user groups or assign that customer to particular tech or sales staff.  The Tech+Center provides a comprehensive ticketing/support solution to round out a collaborative, inter-departmental business solution that enables several areas of a typical business to operate more efficiently by sharing data and information with Web+Center.

The new Customer+Mobile application and the Customer+Center application empower your own customers to obtain a higher level of support that can help differentiate your business from other competing businesses.

TOO MANY SYSTEMS!

When we talk to many of our Web+Center users, we learn that many organizations and businesses have historically created a large set of disconnected applications and processes.  Information about the customer, product purchases or service provided, is often located in some spreadsheet  that is not accessible to everyone in the company and not easily coupled with customer information and the customer history.

With a small amount of customization, Web+Center can be the tool to automate your business to a higher level of productivity and better customer satisfaction.  The Web+Center is an excellent tool to bridge the information gap with information relating to  to pre-sales, sales, product distribution, support and purchasing information.

Business Process 2 – Building your customer relationships with personalized customer emails

The Business+Center application provides a set of email message utilities  to send out personalized emails to customers and customer user groups.  A new feature in Web+Center version 7.5  was recently added to the Customer summary page in the Business+Center application to quickly and efficiently email customers with messages and add updates to the customer notes and set specific customer user categories.

If you are a small business owner today, an important requirement is to continually make personal connections with your customers.  When it comes time for renewal, upgrades or purchasing more products, they will be more likely to continue their business relationship with you if you have kept in contact in a way that enables them to  feel connected with your business or organization.  Many products and services become a commodity and users simply do a quick Internet search to find another vendor offering the same service or product for less if they don’t feel a personally connected with the vendor.

To help establish  that important vendor-customer relationship, we have added a new feature to Business+Center  that allows you to create and send  personalized emails from a combination of a template message and personalized text.  As you create this message, you are also presented with the complete “summary” of information about this customer  showing a list of their support cases, invoices and internal customer notes.  An email sent to the customer with this new form is documented as an entry into the customer notes.

The screen shots and text below explain how to use this new feature within Business+Center.  Business+Center is one of 6 applications bundled with Web+Center including Tech+Center, Pocket+Center, Customer+Center,  Reservation+Center and Customer+Mobile.  We have created this example on our own web-site evaluation site, so you can review the information presented in this newsletter directly on-line at:

Business+Center  On-line evaluation Test Site

Step 1: Login into the Business+Center (http://hostname/business70/ ) with your Tech account

Step 2: Create an HTML or plain text personalized  message.  Include the necessary special tags to personalize your email to include their name and the customize email text.  To create an email newsletter/email template:

•  Press Email Options button
•  Enter Email Template Subject
• Enter Email body (see screen shot below)
• Enter Email Reply to organizational name and Email
• Press Submit

Step 3:  Find a  customer and review their summary information  (additional contact information, invoices and support cases) and then compose a personalized bit of text to be embedded into the personalized email.   The summary page allows you to review all of the customer’s important information on a single screen view showing customer notes, invoices, support cases, etc.

Step 4: Fill out the Send Customer Personalized Email form at the bottom of the Customer Summary page and press the Send Personalized Email Message. This form will perform all of the steps with a single submit:

• Send a personalized email using the selected template to the individual customer.
• Set a particular user category setting if selected
• Add a note to the customer notes section for that customer

Conclusions:

Most businesses and organizations can benefit from this consolidation of reporting and tracking of customer information and outlining what products or services they have purchased.
Web+Center provides that easily configurable whole business solution that you can’t create using other one-size-fits-all Help Desk applications. 
Contact Internet Software Sciences to find out how we can help you solve your business automation requirements.

Sincerely,
Scott Vanderlip
President, Internet Software Sciences