8 Benefits of Sales Order Automation
How your business is processing sales orders directly affects your Order to Cash process. If you are still stuck in an outdated, manual process you are at risk of ultimately driving down your overall profitability and customer satisfaction. Fully-managed automated solutions are specifically designed to save businesses time, and therefore, boost profits and customer service.
Minimize Order Entry Time
One of the most time-consuming issues sales people and customers face is the vast amount of paperwork necessary to close a sale and ensure the best customer service. Sales Order Automation intercepts your customers’ orders, verifies they are correct, and enters them directly into your ERP system. This prevents the continual reentry of information, like contact info, and the need for entering information into multiple areas for your internal software and your warehouse management system. The painstaking, repetitive task of data entry is taken off the shoulders of your busy customer service department, allowing them to spend their time on more rewarding tasks.
Enhance Customer Service
Order automation integrates with your production-associated system, giving sales reps instant access to all important customer account information. Rather than spending precious time navigating through a plethora of paperwork, your sales team can focus on providing best quality of service to your customers with all the information regarding their account at the sales rep’s fingertips online.
Order Automation solutions confirm order completeness and spot inconsistencies and anomalies within orders. Therefore, if a client has ordered the wrong product, or not met the minimum order quantity, you’ll be able to query it. This means that you can support your customers even when they’ve made an error, and since automated order entry doesn’t present errors like humans do, your internal order entry accuracy should improve as well.
Reduce Accounting Costs
It takes time for someone to manually transfer information from various formats into back-end systems, and in the case of employees, time is literally money. Automatic integration between order processing software and your ERP system reduces the time necessary for manual entry and also reduces the need for management controls to check the manual data entry.
Scale up and down easily
Organizations working hard to gain market share and increase orders from existing customers will benefit from automation as it ensures you always have the capacity to process those orders when they arrive. This will eliminate order backlog, or rapid on-boarding of new customer service staff just to get an influx of orders into the system.
Increase Data Visibility
Everyone is prone to mistakes. When employees are tasked with manually entering information, or sales reps are physically holding order forms, slipups are bound to happen. When customers expect one thing, but cannot review their order until the information has been transferred from the sales rep into the accounting system, misunderstandings will happen. These are all instances where organizations lose control of their data. With sales order automation, you significantly reduce the opportunity for data errors, data loss, and data security breaches because the data passes through fewer hands. Utilizing a customer portal for tracking and reviewing orders online, gives visibility and reduces the opportunity for misunderstandings between you and your customers.
Process Orders from Anywhere
Sales Order Automation combined with a Cloud platform provides an opportunity to process orders from anywhere, 24X7. With order processing online, your location is limited only to your product shipping area and to costs customers are willing to pay to receive your product in their location.
Happier Staff
At the end of the day, it’s your staff who will grow your business and help it succeed. No more countless hours spent on dull data entry will create more opportunity for time spent on tasks with added value. Fewer customer complaints, thanks to your new accuracy, will also help to improve the morale of your customer service department. Using automation to take their problems away is one of the easiest and most effective ways to win their support.
Faster Shipping
A good order processing system will allow you to easily send orders straight to your warehouse without needing to rekey the order. With this capability, you can reduce errors, decrease warehouse costs and increase the order to ship time. Customers and sales reps will also be able to see shipping confirmations and track info in real time.
Automation of order entry, regardless of the format, is often the starting point for many businesses seeking to make improvements within their organization. If you feel these benefits should be applied to your business process, Contact Netsymm today!
