July 2015

On-demand service industry has been growing in India. Today we have on-demand service starting from cabs to laundry. This is catching up a trend among the new generation as it makes their life easy. Soon things like getting a haircut, fixing a tap becomes a part of on-demand service industry.

Say you have a great idea that would be a part of on-demand service economy, and then you need to know just two things to get started – a business knowledge of your industry and technologies you need to run your business. This blog is all about the latter one.

Mobile app for all participants

Most of the on-demand services operate by making aggregation of local services in their industry. In simple sense business make a tie-up or an agreement with the other business entity or individuals at different locations. These business entity or individuals are called vendors.

I get chance to speak with many small business owners like you through mediums such as phone, skype, hangout and sometimes face to face. Every time when they speak about the internal business management software, the topic of workflow comes along the way.

Being small business owner, you may have mindset that business process management system (BPMS) is for big organizations and it’s too complex for small teams. You may be partially right. This blog will throw some light on business process management system for small team.

You are at the center of your small team

If you are running a business with small team having around 10-30 people, then no matter what, you would be at the center of your small team. Every information flows through you. If the team is spread across the geographical this becomes even more complex. Most of your time is spent communicating between your employees.

If this is you, then you are reading the right blog. I know you don’t need a full functional business process management system. But what you need is a component of BPM- that is workflow management system.

If you are reading this post, then you are well aware of what those terms SaaS and CRM mean. May be you are in the process to evaluate the best CRM system for your business. You are doing this because CRM from brands such as Salesforce, Sap or Microsoft is too complex for your medium sized business to fit in.

So which is the best SaaS based CRM for your business? Believe me, none of them are your best fit. Now you may think that this is baseless argument. Of course, it’s not. I am going to tell you the thoughts collected from various entrepreneurs during my freelancing from last 5 years. Read ahead, if you are interested.

Missing factor in SaaS based CRM system

Your company finds a sweet spot in the market by differentiating on how you serve the customers. This is directly dependent on how the company operates internally. In simple word, business process directly reflects the customer service. Better the business process at your company, best you serve your customers.

Now that said, most of the CRM available as SaaS focus on 3 key areas – Marketing, Sales Customer service. This is required by all the companies irrespective of their size. These CRM can be customized to a predefined extent to increase their relevancy to your business. But they real miss is the business process integration.

So you have done with building your online service or a product. The very last feature is to have online payment system for your customer to pay you. This is last feature, but very crucial one. You may use online payment service such as chragebee, chragify , recurly etc and integrate with your system. But wait, they charge you more and the fact is you end up paying more in long run.

Think of it; you can build your own, fully controlled online payment system by using payment gateway from the bank where you hold business account. Yes, it’s safe if you consider 5 things described in this blog. Read them and get your developer to follow them during development.

Save your order with the payment gateway response

Every order or subscription done at your website is being saved in database. Your developer includes business relevant information such as subscription end date or number of pieces ordered in the database. However, he may miss out with the key information – payment gateway response.

Payment gateway response is information given out by the payment gateway for every transaction – be it successful or failure. This is very important information at times. In fact, during a dispute between you and your bank this information is a key. Hence make sure that your developer saves it in the database.

You may be motivated to start your freelancing career after reading blogs and speaking to other freelancers. Everyone advice you to have a personal website to promote you service. In fact they tell you that websites as your identify on the internet. But what they don’t tell you is how to make your freelance website such that clients come to you. This blog guide you to build one such website.

First impression is the best impression

Home page is the first page to visit by any new clients. Since you are completely new in their world, they willing don’t want to stay more than 20 seconds there. This means you have got just 20 seconds to retain them.  You can do that by introducing yourself in just a line or two. Below is a quick example of mine.

Also note to have a good tagline for yourself that would convince your customer to stay back and browse rest of your website. If you achieve it, you have won a client – of course not an extent to get a order placed.