Workflow Sample: Customer management

Showing posts with label Customer management. Show all posts

Do you pay your alumni class dues? The news is that younger generations find less value in alumni associations.

Anyways, various membership fees are today more often payable online. And in order to cut back on communication expenses, a lot of organizations send reminders by email. Organizations with few members can process information for each member, at a fixed time of the year, and then one-by-one check off every member who paid. Email reminders can benefit from templates.

Our second article in the "photo shoot" series shall concern product photo shoots for mail-order companies.
In particular, an apparel company's mail-order website has to change its photos for every shift in season, trend, or current topic. Photo shoots are an everyday workflow. They will need to be speedy. (In our sample today, we envision at least five directors, five photographers and five web designers in charge of image processing.)

In Japan people spend the first three days of the year with their family and relatives. Questetra, too, closes its office from December 29 to January 3.
Many may say they don't feel like thinking about business processes during the New Year holidays, but they can't stop us; we're going to post again today anyway. (With a simple improvement sample, however.)

Yesterday's sample in "General Affairs Can Be in Charge of Replying to New Years Cards" is a workflow for widely collecting information from employees. Let's think of how we can improve it.

Happy New Year!
This year we hope to continue offering instantly-useful workflows, and we look forward to your requests and feedback.

In Japan today, there are probably a lot of people reading through their pile of received New Years cards. Even in the age of email, they say 120 million Japanese send a total of 3 billion New Years cards, to old college friends, colleagues, clients, and everyone in between. And if you get one from someone you didn't send one to, you promptly send one back in return.

The below sample is for a company that systemizes its business-related New Years cards. General Affairs is in charge of sending reply New Years cards with the company name.

When a company plans a seminar or event, registered participants are often sent emails a month/week/day before the actual date. These are for word-of-mouth marketing ("Don't forget to come," "Tell your friends," "Bring your friends," etc.) as well as simple reminders ("This is what we'll be doing," "Here's the agenda," "Here are some helpful links," etc.). The number and content of these emails depend on each company's methods, and they will inevitably differ according to involved products and services.

We already introduced examples with open houses and test drive events: "Sending Reminder Emails Without Fail" and "How to Monitor the Occurrence of Irregular Cases."

Requesting for permission to work overtime or on holidays is a task that is often neglected. Sometimes people end up reporting it after it happens, or forget to report it altogether unless sent a reminder. This makes it unnecessarily hard to calculate salary payments at the end of the month.

You may want to find an incentive that makes people submit overtime requests in time, but if that's not possible, at least to make them report overtime hours without being told. You could have the boss get mad, have Accounting send a complaint, or have someone else submit the reports... but none of these seem practical.

Many companies have a stockpile of cell phones, handy terminals, multifunction machines, sensors and other devices that employees and clients can rent when necessary. Sometimes it gets where administrative staff feel like they work in a library, but this is a pretty important service that employees will want to utilize.

When there are relatively few devices available you can manage reservations with a calendar application, but this doesn't allow the option of managing returns.

Real estate and automobile agents seem to be constantly thinking of campaign events, from open houses to test driving events.

How can companies efficiently process applications and make sure applicants actually arrive on the scheduled date? How can companies eliminate errors and make sure everyone is replied to? In other words, you want to make sure there are zero mistakes in email addresses, but you want to be able to write friendly messages to each prospective customer.