5 Things You May Not Know You Can With Acctivate
Acctivate is a key enabler for accurate inventory management and smooth order processing. But that’s not all it does. By harnessing these lesser-known capabilities, you can streamline your business processes further and reap the benefits. Here are five things you didn’t know you could do with Acctivate:
Manage RMAs from request to resolution
An efficient RMA process allows your company to track and monitor returns and exchanges in a way that is hassle-free for the customer and cost-effective for you. You can combine Acctivate’s Business Activities with simple web forms on your site to streamline the process further.
There are a number of ways you can save time and reduce errors in your RMA handling:
Keep everything in one place – Use Business Activities inside of of Acctivate for your RMA process to save time for your employees and to keep returns from slipping through the cracks. The Business Activity can be attached to the original order, the customers, and any new documents created throughout the process. You can also communicate with the customer directly from the Business Activity and track the status using your Business Activity dashboard.
Allow customers to initiate returns from your e-commerce website – Customers will love you if returns are as simple as the initial purchase. You can simplify the process for them—and for your company— by creating a form on your website that allows customers to easily request the return. The form submission can be inserted directly into Acctivate as a Business Activity. You can also use our Acctivate Connector to display open RMA’s on your ecommerce website or trigger notification emails to your customer.
Make returns an extension of the buying transaction – Take this up a notch by including a link in your order or shipment confirmation email that loads the RMA request form and embeds the order number and product ID. When the customer clicks on the link, the RMA request form will automatically populate with the product information. This may require a developer’s touch, but it will be worth the effort when a smooth return process results in excellent reviews.
Make returns easy to monitor – Attaching the RMA Business Activities to the original sales order, the credit memo, and even the customer will make it easy for anyone in your operation to track and work on the RMA process.
These are just a few of the ways you can improve Business Activity-based RMA processes for your operation. Business Activity statuses, priorities, and codes for RMAs can be customized to match your required workflow. Your Acctivate consultant can help you create the process that works best for you.
Turn contact form entries from your website into actionable Business Activities in Acctivate
If there is one area of customer service we repeatedly see ignored by our customers and other businesses, it’s the handling of contact form entries from their websites. One reason for this is the sheer amount of spam they typically receive. But even after you kill the spam, contact form submissions can get lost in your inbox if there’s no way to track whether they have been handled. This is especially true of shared public inboxes that don’t have a single owner.
The solution? Turn any type of website form into Business Activities in Acctivate. Create a Business Activity type for each different form and automatically assign all submissions to the person or department that should handle the request. The next time they log into Acctivate, they’ll see the new request on their dashboard with all the necessary information to take care of it. You can even assign a dynamic due date (one day, three days, etc.).
There are a few ways to get contact form submissions into Acctivate. For the most technical among you, Acctivate has a built-in User Stored Procedure that accepts the formatted contact form information and creates the Business Activity for you. You can read our article on integrating your website with Acctivate Business Activities for instructions on how to do this on your own.
But if you aren’t technical, or just don’t have the time, Our Acctivate Connector add-on can help. Simply post the contact form submitting to a web hook, and the add-on takes care of the rest. This is easy to do if you have a website platform with a dynamic form builder (like WordPress with Gravity Forms).
Regardless of which approach you take, you can get creative with contact forms to collect any common requests you get. Some examples: Request a Printed Catalog, Request a Sales Call, Report a Problem with your Website, Request an RMA (see the section related to RMAs in this article), Request a Demo, Request a Service Call. The list is endless.
Save time and minimize data errors on your website with a product sync that automates the maintenance of your e-commerce site
When you’re working with Acctivate and an e-commerce website, it is very time-consuming to keep the data in both systems up to date. This is particularly painful in industries with rapidly changing product catalogs and pricing. Many businesses are able to export and import the data—but it requires a significant time investment. And when the data isn’t perfect, errors abound.
You can fix this with a simple tool: a product sync utility that allows you to manage your data in one place only. Update your product information and pricing in Acctivate, and go to lunch while your sync utility updates your e-commerce website.
Our Acctivate Connector has a product sync that works with popular e-commerce solutions. You can use it to create new products or update existing ones in your website, assign products to the correct categories, upload the image stored in Acctivate to your website, and more.
Manage warranty registrations and warranty requests without third-party software
You can use Acctivate’s Business Activities can manage registrations and service requests for your products’ warranty. You can collect the registrations from your website and automatically create a Business Activity, and then link the Activity to the original sales order and customer. You can also use a customer contract or custom fields in the detail line of the original sales order to save the warranty information. Keeping your warranty information inside of Acctivate makes it easy to reference from any point in your customer service process.
You can also use Business Activities to manage warranty requests; keeping everything organized within one system. Again, you can collect warranty requests from your website and automatically create the request as a Business Activity. You can also link the warranty request to the warranty registration so that you have all the information at your fingertips as you move through the warranty process.
Business Activities make it easy to keep track of warranty requests by eliminating the need to bounce back between multiple systems.
Give your customers access to their account information
While this isn’t technically something you can do inside of Acctivate, it’s a great extension to Acctivate for B2B businesses. Many of our clients subscribe to our Customer Portal because they are spending too much time answering customer calls for things like:
• requests for order status and shipment tracking information
• invoice payments
• questions about an old invoice or order, and
• placing orders (this happens when their e-commerce site isn’t B2B-friendly).
And increasingly, their customers aren’t happy to wait until operating hours for the information. They want it when they need it.
Our Customer Portal puts your customer in control of their account. They can log in and do pretty much anything they need; at any time of day or night. Customers can see their current order statuses, track shipments, view and pay invoices, and search order and invoice history. They can also place orders online using an order form that was designed for B2B users, making it faster and easier for them to place their orders.
These are just five ways Acctivate can make your business more efficient. Do you have a challenge that needs an ‘out of the box’ solution? Call us at 940-566-2420 to find out if we can help!
