Question

Your manager has asked you to create a web portal for your company’s customers, where they can place orders for the products and services they wish to purchase. Today, customers call and place orders with your company’s call center, where professional customer service representatives perform the order entry. Your first thought is to web-enable the system used by the customer service reps. What problems and challenges might you face if you simply made an order entry application designed for professional use available to the public? Describe the study you would conduct to create a customer-friendly order entry web application that gets the job done. You also want to let customers place orders using Smartphones and tablets. Do you want to use a responsive website, create a custom “app,” or do both? Justify your choices.

Answer 1

The problems and challenges that might arise if an order entry system designed for professionals is made available to the public are mentioned below:

1. The order entry system used by the professionals might not have all the necessary details required for deciding whether to buy the product or not. The professionals might be using some sort of product code for entering the order in the system. There is also a possibility that no images are stored for the products. But if that system needs to be web-enabled and made available to the public, the system should have the product description and features as thorough as possible.
2. In the professional order entry system, option of searching products by category, price, brand etc. might not be available. For example- if a normal user wants to purchase products within a fixed budget and he wants to purchase only a specific brand, he will not have the option to filter by his choice.
3. Various modes of payments like pay by debit/credit card, wallets, cash on delivery etc. might not be available in the professional order entry system
4. The professional order entry system might not have the infrastructure in place to cater to large volumes of orders. If the web-enabled system is made available to the public and it can't handle large volumes, the customers are likely to get no response from server, page timed out etc.

To create a customer-friendly order entry web application, thorough research needs to be done to understand all the requirements and put it in place. User experience plays a vital role in deciding the layout of the product. The features should be easily understandable to the public. Also thorough research needs to be done to understand the demands of the various products and services the company have. If the demand is high, the system should have the proper IT infrastructure in place to cater to large volumes of orders.The payments part of the product should have all the options for the user to decide how they are going to pay. For example, payment by credit card, debit card, netbanking, wallets, cash on delivery should be available. A feedback system should also be part of the design. The product should have some option of taking the feedback from the user after a purchase is done. The system should have some questions in place to ask the user about the order placing process. One of the questions can be like this- Did you face any challenges while placing the order? The ansswers to these questions would be helpful for the company to understand the bottleneck and the company can take proper action to improve the product further.

Smartphones and tablets played an integral part in today's world. Since majority of the people are using these devices, it is imperative for the company to have their products available in these devices. Before deciding whether to create an app or a responsive website, the company should do a thorough research to understand the percentage of people using apps and browsers in their smartphones and tablets.

Responsive website design might be faster and from cost perspective, it is cheaper compared to developing mobile apps. But websites in mobile browsers will take time to load and it is a bit difficult to navigate to various sections from the website. On the other hand, the performance in an app would be much faster and from a user experience perspective also, it would provide a good value to the customer. Also, the company can leverage the new technologies for developing the app but for mobile websites, there might not be newer technologies to improve the performance.

So initially it might be good to have the website to attract new customers since the website results appear after searching for a product or service online. But over a long term, the company should focus more on having the customers access the product through the app because of the benefits discussed here.