Customers’ needs and a b2b-portal
Know your customers
An expensive business mistake
Know your customers
About ten years ago, I was a CEO of a plant. We sold our products to distributors, and there were more than 90 of them in several countries. They sent us orders the way they preferred — by email, fax (yes, we had to keep an old fax machine in the office), phone, or even SMS. A small army of clerks worked in the spacious open space in our office. They received the orders, registered them, and converted them into the form fitted for our ERP system. They also kept the distributors informed about everything concerning their orders. Every time I signed an annual payroll, my heart bled — so much work without any visible added value!
And then our IT department built up a b2b online portal for the distributors. Since then, they could log in to their personal account and see the statuses of the placed orders, place a new one, reconcile their debts, receive additional information on the products, etc. We presented this hi-tech solution to the distr…