E-commerce can Reduce Cycle Time, Improve Employees’ Empowerment and Facilitate Customer Support

*Reduce Cycle time*
Cycle Time is the amount of time between a customer placing and order and receiving the goods. With e-commerce, substantial of the process can be eliminated. For instance, a customer does not need to queue to make order. Thus improve customer service and also reduce cycle time. Besides that, ecommerce can reduce cycle time by eliminating intermediaries between sellers and buyers which is also known as disintermediation. This is not only reducing cost but it also reduce the time where the customer have to go through intermediate person in order to enjoy the goods and services of the company. In addition, disintermediation leads to faster provision of products and services to the marketplace through streamlined and thus cheaper production. In addition, with the advances of technology nowadays, the speed of producing transaction online keep on increasing thus further reduce the cycle time.

A very successful company that uses e-commerce to reduce substantial cycle time is Dell Company. Dell revenue primarily gains from selling its products online. The whole buying process can be done online therefore customer no longer required to enter duplicate information in order to purchase. The electronic requisition can approved electronically and automatically become an electronic purchase order. This order will flows directly into Dell’s manufacturing system where the order are processed immediately. Thus, helping the customer to save time and also increase the company efficiency.

Dell Online Purchase Order

*Improve Employees' Empowerment*
Besides that, e-commerce can also lead to employee empowerment. By using e-commerce, employee training can be conducted online. The manager can provide CD-ROM to their employee and ask them to learn the necessary skills online. To further increase the efficiency of using this method to train the employees, the manager can even conduct a test to access their employees. Furthermore, many companies have developed its own company intranet where manager can easily communicate with their employees and vice versa. This is very hard in the conventional way of communication where every time the subordinate wants to communicate with their superior, they need to make formal appointment and that process takes time. With company intranet, the employees can get the most updated company announcement and manager’s instructions. They can even present their results to the manager online.

Coastal's Clarity CD-Rom training

*Facilitate Customer Support*
Moreover, good customer support plays an essential role in every business. Business studies have shown that happy customers will lure 4 other people to the business. On the other hand, unhappy customer will tell 10 people how unsatisfied they are with the company. Human behaviors are very hard to change, therefore, in order to attract more customers and retain current customers; a company must provide excellent customer support system. E-commerce certainly can facilitate customer support better than the traditional business trading. The common tool in a company website is FAQ. With this, the customers do not even have to ask a question but they can get the answer from FAQ. If it happens that the question in which the customer want to ask and it is not available in the FAQ, the question will directed to auto responders. Auto responders can perform 24hours per day without having to take a rest. Therefore, it can response to customer query and complaints anytime. For example, when a customer post a question to the auto responder, the auto responder can automatically send the customer the appropriate information in response to the standard question. If a customer replies to an auto responder they can receive an automated email with a link to the FAQ section to read those problem usually encounter by others.

For full picture please visit http://www.pizzahut.com/FAQ.aspx

Besides that, some company such as Nike and Jaguar provide a special function for their customer to design their own shoe and cars to increase their customer satisfaction. By allowing customers to track delivery of parcels in real time, the Federal Express website keeps customers in touch with the location of their goods and when they will arrive. In addition, a company website also provide shopping cart where it allows customers to track back the products that they selected and produce the order once. All these function has considerably increased customer satisfaction.

Please click the link below and have a look at this demo:

Fedex Insight Demo

Wanna experience customizing your own shoe or car?

Please click on the link below:

Nike

Jaguar

As such, more and more companies are engaging their business through e-commerce where it can greatly reduce the cycle time, improve employees’ empowerment and facilitates customer support.