Understand the Business Value of your Web Server

Emerging Innovations are often consulted by companies that want to begin integrating their sales or back-room operations with the web. Discussing the ways that the web server can assist and add value to business operations seems to always come as a surprise.

Therefore, we thought we'd list five of the most common suggestions that we make during these meetings. Think about your business and we're sure they'll give you food for thought.

Store credit card details for payment on dispatch

I'm sure you already know that websites can charge credit cards. However, sometimes orders can be taken with long lead times and it is unprofessional to take payment until the product has been dispatched.

Using a combination of Payment Solution Providers such as SagePay and PayPal it is possible and a stock management system users can place orders on your website and have their card charged when the stock is ready for shipment.

Do something at a specified time

A lot of the customers we see seem to be glued to manual tasks, often back-office repetitive tasks. Automating these via a web server allows you to potentially add value to your business and your web presence.

For example, emails can be automatically generated based on individual preferences and emailed out at sales maximising periods. A number of our customers receive data in their inbox automatically every morning on the last days trading activity. Simple, secure and reliable.

Respond to incoming emails

We are not just talking about automatic email responders here. Web servers have the ability to read incoming emails and to fire off a reply. OK, they aren't a substitute for an admin team but what about a help-desk that scans the queries for common words and responds with possible solutions until an operator is available.

Using such an approach problems may be solved immediately and the personalised, albeit automated, response will be greatly appreciated by the customer have a problem no doubt.

Receive and reply to data requests

If your website offers a service that others could benefit from then start to think about how that service could be delivered on their site. With a bit of thinking you'll see how this might apply to any site from language translation to an online shop.

For example, by developing a piece of code - called an API - your website can receive a request for information from an affiliate site, it can check their account (or even charge their credit card!) and return the required information. This might be to confirm a product is in stock and add it to the affiliate's shipment or to send back a document from their account.

Book a place or a timeslot

You may have read our thoughts on the Midnight Surfer. They are the name given to a user that is visiting your website during the night and want to get as much done as possible. Far from reading the message "call us" we want them to have the opportunity to engage directly with your business.

This might be booking a seat or making an appointment with you. Linking website to account manager diaries is something that will both free up your admin staff time and provide positive customer experiences on your website.

We hope that above examples are useful to you. They are general ones so please feel free to contact us if you'd like a chat about your own website. We're confident we'll be able to help.