Continue reading »]]> Many of us are just old enough to remember the UPS commercial about the company that launched their new online store.  The handful of entrepreneurs cheered as they saw the first orders come in.  When the orders picked up and number more than 100, they screamed. Then 1000 orders…unbelievable. Then, as the numbers continued to grow, the mood became somber? Now what do they do?

That same scenario applies equally today. You’ve built your new Magento eCommerce site. It’s branded to reflect your company image, SEO is effectively in place and you’re getting great visibility and traffic. Orders are coming in, you’re getting paid. But what happens when the calls start coming for support? How will you manage customer requests that can’t be managed in 5 minutes or less and require follow up? What about return requests? What if the caller is a reseller who has special terms and price lists that the call center agent needs to know about when they answer?

These are all key needs that products like SugarCRM address. For growing and successful merchants, you’re online store front is just one piece. Continuing to build the requisite infrastructure needed to handle the call center, latest shipping and billing information from your ERP system, and provide customer interaction history is an important step to ensure your company can scale effectively as online order volume grows.

To solve this issue Magento and SugarCRM are uniquely well paired. As Enterprise class open source applications, each provides the architectural framework to allow these two systems to be tightly integrated so whether you’re taking orders online, on the phone, in the store, or all 3, your customer service team can have one common view and representation of all that is occurring for that customer and your business.

Levementum, as the world’s largest SugarCRM partner, and Magento’s 2011 Emerging Partner of the year, has experience in bringing these two heavy weight champions together in an integrated solution set.

Levementum helped Valtim Marketing Solutions achieve this success by integrating SugarCRM and Magento Enterprise Edition to accommodate all customer touch points.  You can read the brief Valtim Marketing Solutions Success Story for additional information on how this integration helped Valtim achieve the customer and sales success they were looking for with a completely integrated end-to-end solution.

Continue reading »]]> A few questions to consider:

• Is your company one of many that sells not only direct to consumers, but also through partners, affiliates, and/or distribution channels?
• Have you discussed expanding your web presence to capture more online sales but held off because you view your direct to consumer (B2C) business too small to invest in?
• Are you looking to find ways to lower the operational costs (or cost of sales) with supporting your channel sales model to allow investment in other growth areas?
• What about giving your existing sales force the ability to service a larger number of clients, particularly new and smaller ones, without having to invest the same amount of sales time and effort?

One of the recent trends we see is companies that typically sell their goods and services through channel partners (resellers, distributors, affiliates) are looking to augment their traditional field or inside sales model with a more robust ecommerce solution.  For B2B companies, it is common to multiple price lists per customer or customer tier, separate or even bonded inventory, and alternate payment terms and purchasing rules for their different sets of channel partners.

As these companies continue to grow, the cost of expanding their customer base through traditional means not only becomes cost ineffective, but it often results in declining customer value because the typical sales person can only support a certain number of target customers through manual processes.

Enter eCommerce solutions and Magento Enterprise. The Magento solution stack provides the framework for taking all levels of complexities per account or account type, and simplifying them into set or repeatable and high automated workflows that are integrated directly to your ERP system.

This system integration allows for consistent, up to date pricing, inventory levels and lead times, as well as greater customer self-sufficiency.

Levementum was able to create this efficiency for Troxell.  To read more about how this solution helped Troxell and their customers by utilizing eCommerce technology to enable the next level of scale and growth for their sales force, read Troxell’s brief Solution Summary or the complete White Paper.

Continue reading »]]> X.commerce looks to provide the framework to solve the problems many businesses run into when they find themselves with systems integrated from a series of batch jobs or home grown systems. It is the grand vision that a registration on any of these systems could propagate in real time to other systems, and provide a truly universal view of a customer regardless of the means of interaction.

In the fall of 2011, Magento announced its x.commerce initiative to the world at the Innovate Conference. More precisely, Ebay announced x.commerce with Magento Enterprise Edition at its core. In its recent Imagine Conference in April of 2012, Magento provided a deeper look into this roadmap and what it means to the business customer.

Today, most mid to large companies have significant investments in eCommerce, ERP, CRM, Customer Service tools, and other point solutions which have been assembled from best of breed suppliers over the years.  Some of these solutions are eventually integrated together via a series of batch jobs, and perhaps even real time interfaces using SOAP or REST. Often these integrations are limited and are cobbled together over several years. Still, it’s not uncommon for many to sit in their own silos, requiring manual rekeying of information between systems that results in errors, process breakdowns, and lower productivity within the enterprise.

What x.commerce is being positioned to offer is a method to tie many new era, often open source solutions, together through a common set of integration interfaces and protocols that allows companies to deploy and leverage a truly integrated set of tools that are linked as a means of planned and maintained architecture.

Consider the following scenario:

1. A customer registers on your website to look at products. They view items, perhaps add a few to their cart, but do not complete a purchase.
2. The customer then calls in to get information on a promotional program he or she saw. To assist in this, the call center rep has to create a contact record with a call note in a CRM tool.
3. The customer places an order via the phone, or perhaps via a catalog, resulting in a customer record being created in the ERP system as well. Now there is an order in ERP tied to a customer’s ‘master’ record which neither the ecommerce nor call center solution (often CRM) know about.
4. Now the customer calls in with a question about their order, the support representative has to first figure out how the order was placed, look it up in ERP, and then create a call tracking record in the CRM to keep track of the findings should the customer call again.  Yet, the eCommerce site knows nothing of this.
5. Now, the customer wants to go back online and either check their existing order, which he or she can’t, or better yet, place a new order. That order often results in the creation of another customer record in ERP and CRM unless you’ve built out integrations between all 3 systems.

For sales, marketing and support – the benefit is obvious.  For the IT professional… we can only hope the vision is realized.

What are your thoughts? What other benefits do you see x.commerce providing?

Continue reading »]]> Today’s business environment is changing and evolving faster than ever before. It is becoming increasingly difficult to make the incremental improvements that lead to improved profitability and competitive advantage. The survival of any business in this highly competitive environment requires adopting a strategy and culture of continuous improvement. Continuous improvement can be equated to Darwin’s hypothesis of ‘survival of the fittest’. Those best suited to adapt and change are most likely to survive.

Businesses have now been evolving for many years, those who have survived the long-term have done so in large part as a function of their willingness to change and adapt. We have learned from the failures and successes of those who came before us and as a consequence the changes we seek now are in terms of ‘tweaks’. We look for the small changes and corrections that lead to greater profitability, success and survival.

The key to continuous and incremental improvement is understanding the data that drives and is derived from business-as-usual, knowing the environment. Once you have a clear view of the environment, then making informed decisions and taking action can be the difference between growth and stagnation.

The keys to understanding the environment and making informed and intelligent decisions based on this understanding is commonly referred to as Business Intelligence. The path to effective Business Intelligence (BI) can be summarized as follows:

1. Establishing clear business goals, objectives and/or initiatives.
2. Identify and prioritize the metrics and measures that are linked to each goal, objective and/or initiative.
3. Map specific individuals or teams to the measures and metrics being monitored and ensure they are empowered to influence each measure.
4. Monitor the data for next actions, progress and for intended results.

The path above may be simple and understated, however it clearly and concisely outlines the keys to successful BI. It requires the participation of management and staff as well as technology to help collect, organize and present the identified measures and metrics.

Levementum has implemented BI solutions for businesses of all sizes and specializes in guiding companies through the process of implementing a successful BI strategy coupled with industry leading technology. The Business Intelligence solutions are designed to meet specific business goals and objectives through the use of technology coupled with empowered teams or individuals. The combination of Levementum’s staff expertise, structured methods, and industry visibility can help your company take ideas from inception to deployment.

Visit our website for more on Open Source Business Intelligence.