A lot of businesses think of their website purely as a marketing tool designed to attract customers and neglect another very important benefit – making your office staff happy. There are actually countless ways in which your WordPress site can help the efficiency of your back office. The most important is the ability to collect information in an organized, searchable fashion.
Contact Forms
A well designed contact form, like Gravity Forms, allows you to collect the appropriate and necessary customer information, keep all the inquiries in one place, and gives you the ability to search through them. In addition, you can keep track of which inquiries have been responded to so that multiple office staff can share the load of reaching out to your clients.
Payment Form
Online donations are very convenient for the customers. Both Gravity Forms and WooCommerce provide you with many great options. Many small businesses avoid making these available because the task seams daunting and they are concerned about the additional cost. In reality, having the money deposited directly to your account, and having an electronic record of who paid for what services and when they did, saves countless hours of to trying to sort through checks and paper mail. It is well worth the additional payment processing fee.
Memberships and Subscriptions
If your business operates on a subscription basis WooCommerce provides you with hassle free tools for collecting the recurring dues. WordPress can give users privileged access to content that you do not have to distribute to the restricted members groups manually or by sharing countless Google Docs. It also gives the customers the ability to update their personal information and preferences directly from the site. One less burden taken off of your office staff.
Planning and Announcing Events
Is your business organizing events, shows, or social get-togethers? Having to keep an up-to-date event calendar? Keeping track of who is attending, what roles your attendees have, selling event tickets etc.? All these tasks can also be facilitated by a WordPress plugin like WordPress Events Manager. Here, your event information is available to both the clients and the organizers. Ticket sales are taken care of and your calendar is always up-to-date on the site. Your office staff will be able to focus or making the content of the event a hit.
Email Contact
Integrating your customer mailing list into your WordPress is very convenient with email campaign tools. With such a system in place, your WordPress site has the ability to set different roles for different users, depending on whether they are your subscribers, or just participated in an event. With all of the information in one central location you can send email updates and invitations to the specific customer groups.
Thinking that your back office could use some help? Let us know what is most important to your business and we will help you find the set of tool just for you.
