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by Terry Brock
The web continues to grow because it can save businesses lots of money and help them to become more productive. Here are a couple of products that your business can use to increase productivity and get more profit from your website investment.
Get the Answers You Need
Making your website more useful to visitors will keep them coming back. If you have static, unchanging material, it is unlikely that visitors will experience more than a single visit to your site. The key is providing information but also making it accessible to visitors.
Enter AnswerLogic, a new "answer engine" that provides answers on questions visitors would ask regarding your site. Recent surveys by AnswerLogic indicated that 80% of potential customers visiting a website leave without making a purchase or can't find the answer they want. Then when asked why customers leave the #1 answer given is "I don't know."
With a tool like AnswerLogic a company can proceed with an analysis of what customers are asking for and looking for. This information is then tracked and logged to build an ever-expanding knowledge base of information. This information can then be communicated to visitors to provide relevant, pertinent information they need. The company terms this an "answer engine" versus the more widely known search engine where information is revealed but often with enormous irrelevant data. You do have to indicate topics that are liked to be on the website. I tried finding data like "the population of New York City" or "The capital of Florida" and got back no relevant results. However, when I tried entering information on their website about AnswerLogic, the results were fast and relevant.
A company can utilize this technology either as an application on a hosted service or through an on-site license.
The real benefit of a product like AnswerLogic is that it grabs the essence of the question as typed by the website visitor. An answer then is formulated based on previous inquiries into the database.
A product like this will take some time and lots of thought to formulate. However, this is the essence of successfully interacting with customers. You have to know what they are most interested in and why they are visiting your website. What you think is the answer and what they might even tell you might not be the whole picture. By tracking what visitors actually ask and seek to find you can determine greater markets and realize the benefits of what your website is doing. This is true market research that can pay rich dividends for the business willing to invest the time, money and effort required to learn about their customers.
Even if you wouldn't use this product directly, it will pay rich dividends for the wise business owner to see how such a system can benefit them. Visit the site and notice what is being done. Then ask yourself how you could employ technology like this to make your website more customer-friendly and reveal more pertinent information that you need.
(AnswerLogic, www.answerlogic.com, 202-223.1444, price varies depending on application used)
Relegate Administrivia to the Computer
If you're a small business services firm, you don't have time to get all the things done you want to do. You should spend your time concentrating on serving clients and producing the results for them.
Changepoint software offers a product to automate the process of integration of people, projects and budgets within IT consulting services. IT service companies can automate the process of collecting time and billing information, processing invoices, tracking results, checking knowledge base information and more.
The service provides a way for IT service companies to see the qualifications available for various personnel for given tasks. You can select people for a task based on their skills, previous experience and other criteria. Jim Phelps of the old Mission Impossible television series could have used this product!
A company can automate the marketing and sales management process by staying in touch with prospective clients. Engagements can be managed more effectively as everyone involved in an engagement sees what is happening as it is tracked. Time and expense management can be tracked in one place for all involved to monitor. This creates efficiencies in the handling of items that IT consultants don't do as well and would rather focus on what they know and do best.
However, the benefit of collaboration and knowledge management outshine the other benefits. Consultants can work together seamlessly regarding of geographic or time zone differences. As information is discovered about certain aspects of a company in one part of the country, that information can be shared quickly with the rest of the team.
This is the type of tool that successful companies will employ to be more efficient and serve clients more effectively. The IT consulting company saves money in the processing of administrivia while the client company is better served with relevant information delivered in a more timely way. This is a good example of leveraging the power of the Internet to serve customers and clients better.
(Changepoint, www.changepoint.com, 905-886-7700, Cost varies with applications deployed)
Terry Brock is an internationally recognized professional speaker,
consultant and author in the fields of business productivity, technology and
marketing. His is a syndicated columnist for Business Journals across
America and can be reached at 407-363-0505 or by e-mail at
terry@terrybrock.com.
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