With the flourishing of E-commerce around the world over the last 5 years, it’s no surprise that there are more businesses moving their brick-and-mortar store to online business. Now more than ever, shoppers have embraced online shopping as a norm, and this makes businesses struggle to keep up with dynamic e-commerce environment and the unpredictable demands of omnichannel offerings. Businesses can’t afford to ignore having an online presence in this increasingly competitive and connected world. Lack of manpower and time have been a bugbear for small business as they need to face an ever-growing number of business processes and a limited number of employees able to handle them manually. In addition to margins of e-commerce getting squeezed tighter and tighter accompanied by the exponential growth in expectations of customers, making the competition even hotter.
In E-commerce, price wars are not a long-term solution to tackle this anymore as shopper no longer look for best prices – but expect them. Moving your business online, you’re not only better equipped to accommodate the existing customer but also open up your business to an immense customer. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) System is often chosen by companies for its potential to integrate and streamline your complicated business process, giving you real-time data and increase visibility all across the departments.
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What’s more, is that the robust tool allows the business leaders to examine the 360-degree view on how the business performance is that supports a smarter decision-making process in the E-commerce industry.
Bridging the gap with digital solutions
Take a second to think about the last deluge of manual, repetitive task you dealt. Doing those work doesn’t prevent the next batch from appearing. With the pervasiveness of technology in today world, it already showcases that it doesn’t have to do it in this way and implementing ERP is a way out.
1) Improved business integration
Today’s business model has been transformed drastically, requiring a global business ecosystem to be digitally connected—communicate and collaborate with customer, partners, suppliers, vendors and other players in the business.
If you’re still reconciling your data in disparate operational systems, you’re probably running a risk of falling behind from your competitors. Managing data in multiple systems will make the information-seeking process become more time-consuming as the answers you might seek may be buried in a complex spreadsheet that isn’t searchable. Although you know the details are in there, but retrieving the information takes time out of your day, and it can be an immensely frustrating process.
But having a system which integrates financials, human resource, inventory, and customer relationship, you can be sure all the details able to search by just a few clicks.
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2) Create a seamless customer experience
The growth of devices and interaction channels continue to show an exponential pattern many years into the future, customers nowadays expect real-time, efficient, convenient, accessible, and that moves along as they change their devices. Storing customer data in different system may cause missing of the customer information, creating black holes along the customer journey.
Businesses need to understand that it’s no longer enough to just create a workable solution for the consumers but to come out a solution that connects with them – a customer-centric strategy that encompasses all the interactions.
An Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) System meets all your business needs. By combining all the systems together, companies have a single source for all data. Whether someone from financials or sales pulls up the customer record, they see the same complete 360-degree view of the customer.
Related article: 4 Keys To Driving Customer Experience Into Your Digital Transformation
3) Ensure on-time delivery
With the proliferation of competing brands in E-commerce industry, meeting customer’s expectation has become the top priority for every business. A poor delivery experience can have an irreparable impact on your relationship with customers. 84% of customers are unlikely to shop with a brand again after a poor delivery experience. All it takes is one mistake to destroy your brand reputation and customer loyalty.
Today’s consumer has complete control to buy based on their overall customer experience. Comparing price among the retailers beforehand has become a ‘must-do’ for every consumer. Having the lowest price no longer guarantees you a sale.
Having an ERP system gives the company the tools to create a much more transparent and collaborative environment for all stakeholders, allowing customers to track and check their order status from anywhere at any time. When the key stakeholders have the visibility of business performance across all of the departments, then the possibility to make a more sound decision will be much higher.
Amidst the noise and clutter in our world today, what matters is developing personalised and meaningful connections to customers that make your business a reality.
Run your small business faster with FREE ERP today! From a single interface, it allows all the systems can be assessed through one application, streamlines all of the complicated business processes and provides a 360-degree view of how the business performance is.
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