You’ve spent time and resources building a solid presence on the web. It’s attracting visitors and potential customers, but then what?  How does the information and opportunities it creates flow into the other parts of your business processes?

This is often the point at which web sites stall in their development. You know it’s important to get your information out there in order to get leads or even sales online, but, without clear direction, it typically goes no further.  At this point, your web site plays just one role in your business.

By taking the next step, and tying your website into other business processes, you can improve efficiencies and customer experience.

Leads

Contact forms are a commonplace feature on sites today. You want to make sure it’s a simple process for those interested in learning more about your products or services to get in touch with you. Usually this information is sent to someone internally via email. Sometimes that’s sufficient, but what if that person is busy or on vacation? The lead sits in there inbox, hidden until they can get back to it.

A better way to handle this is:

• Have the lead feed directly into a CRM system.
• The lead can go directly into a workflow, sending out notifications to both internal staff and the customer.
• When the main contact is out of the office, the workflow would trigger an email to other staff that a lead has not been responded to and needs follow-up.
• When that response does occur, it is recorded in the CRM system and available for others on staff to see.

In this case, the integration of the web site and the CRM system helps sales stay on top of new business opportunities regardless of staff availability.  One person being out does not hold up everything.  Furthermore, that lead can be tracked and followed from the time it’s entered until it’s closed without any need to manually reenter it into another system.

Support

Just as important as leads coming into sales, are questions and issues coming in from current customers.  Again, integration into CRM or a help desk makes your company more timely and efficient when handling requests.

The efficiencies in how customers are helped can be taken a step further.

• As questions come in, staff can categorize these requests which can then be reported on.  
• As you see trends in what topics are popular, you can proactively address these by creating a knowledge base.  This is a set of reference articles can help both internal support staff and external customers.  
• Your staff can respond quickly with proven answers by directing customers to the knowledge base articles.
• In the future, customers can search these articles and find the answers themselves, eliminating the need for support to get involved in these cases.

Sales

When a company selling products moves to the web, they usually have systems already in place for accounting, inventory tracking, and similar functions.  Once their web site starts bringing in orders, they may need to take the order information gathered from the web and then manually enter it into their internal systems.

The great thing about modern software systems is that data is stored in similar ways. This makes it possible to set up processes that synchronize this data.

 For example, Pinnacle has built a solution called the Connector which allows businesses to set up maps between different databases and specifyhow the information flows between them.  Even if your systems store data in different ways (one stores quantity and unit price while the other just has a total), the integration can still be automated.

With a solution such as the Pinnacle Connector, or direct integration of the website with CRM, a company’s ecommerce store would be able to send the order processing information directly to their other systems, eliminating the possibility of human error, and ensuring that all necessary information has been entered into the correct systems.

Microsoft has released Service Pack 1 (SP1) for Microsoft Exchange Server.

New Features/Updates include:

• "Soft-deleted" mailboxes - Mailboxes can be accessed during a mailbox restore operation.  These are stored until deleted by the IT administrator or until they reach a specific expiration period.
• Outlook web app
• New Management UI
• Archiving and discovery enhancements
• Client Throttling Policies - allowing IT administrators to manage performance of Client Access servers.

Exchange Server 2010 SP1 can be downloaded here.

If you have any questions about the latest release, or need assistance updating your Exchange Server, feel free to contact us at 574-235-8100.

6.  Making Data Tell a Story with Excel 2010 Visuals

There are some very useful new data analysis and visualization tools in Excel 2010. The new Conditional Formatting and especially the new Sparklines feature allows me to show visual insight into the meaning of the numbers I am tracking or presenting.  If you are looking for a way to quickly and easily make sense of data, but don’t want to spend minutes or even hours preparing charts and metrics, you will be pleased with these new tools.

7.  Get the Big Tasks Done Fast and Easy

It’s all thanks to the new Office 2010 Backstage view in all the applications. It replaces the traditional File menu to give you a centralized space for all of your file management tasks. But beyond the simple tasks such as save, save as, and print, it adds powerful, but very easy to use tasks such as creating a new document from the vast template library on Microsoft.com and publishing to SharePoint, your blog, the web, and more. With PowerPoint 2010 you will even find broadcasting and compression options within the Backstage view!

8.  Work with Office Wherever You Are

Many of my clients have run into the same issue. You need people, such as folks on the shop floor and remote users, to be able to work with Office documents but who don’t need full Office features with the full Office price tag.  Office 2010 can greatly help with the new Microsoft Office Web Apps. With Microsoft Office Web Apps and SharePoint, you can easily extend the Office 2010 experience to anyone who has access to your SharePoint site.  Employees, volunteers, venders, customers, etc. can access, view and edit Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote files online from virtually anywhere.  But that’s not the end of the story. Use a Windows smartphone or Laptop? You might like these new features too.

• Microsoft SharePoint Workspace 2010 – If you are a laptop user and your business uses SharePoint (that’s me), you will love SharePoint Workspace. It lets you synchronize SharePoint 2010 lists and libraries that way you can access, view, and edit files anytime and anywhere, without the need for a Wi-Fi connection! When you’re back online, everything will sync again with SharePoint.
• Microsoft Office Mobile 2010 – You can stay current and respond quickly using new mobile versions of Office 2010 applications.

9.  Waiting Your Turn is Old-school.  Now You Can Work Together Simultaneously

This is a great new feature. At Pinnacle, I can find myself wanting to open a document that someone else is working on. We’ve all seen what happens next, you get the familiar options to open a read-only copy, create a local copy to merge later, or receive notification when the original is available. Office 2010 changes the game.

You can use co-authoring in applications such as Word, PowerPoint, Excel Web App, and OneNote shared notebooks. A status bar notification tells you who is currently editing the document and where they’re making changes. Why is this so cool? It’s now so much easier to brainstorm on ideas and meet deadlines now that you can you work in groups.

10.  One More New Outlook Feature (Because Outlook 2010 is That Good) – Conversations

If your day is anything like mine, you are inundated with many emails, from many different people, regarding several different projects. In the past and as a result, most of us found e-mail too often a burden rather than a productivity tool. However, Outlook 2010 has made a big step at help to turn all the noise into music.

Through the Conversation View feature of Outlook 2010, it’s e-mail management made easy. The new view aims to alleviate much of the noise by offering new ways to organize your email. I save valuable time by streamlining my inbox. I can compress long e-mail threads into conversations that can be prioritized, categorized, and conveniently filed-away.