Front Office Box

How we use it ourselves

Over time we want to publish case studies, describing businesses and ways they use our software to organize for outstanding customer service. Who better to start with than Front Office Box. It’s our software and we should be “pathfinding” for our users, figuring out how to use it for as many processes as possible. And we are.

Click here for a short video demonstration, and read below for a description of our business.

Business Model

We offer software as a service, hosted on the Internet, with revenue opportunities from usage fees, provision of external services, advertising and sponsorship and B2B - other business using our software to provide services to their customers.

Resources

There are three principals in the business, and no employees. Almost everything is outsourced to supply chain partners - hosting, design, development, marketing and strategic sales. This lifts the number of people engaged in the supply chain to around 10, across five different businesses.

We’re international, with our own people in the USA and Scotland, and supply chain partners in New Zealand, UK, USA and Canada.

Customers

Our users are small businesses based in India, Finland, Scotland, England, Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Oregon, California and Canada. We’re targeting similar businesses throughout the English speaking world, but primarily in the UK and USA. We’re also targeting B2B customers and channels in the UK.

Processes

Although most activities are outsourced, we’re still involved in managing them, so we have functions for

  • Planning
  • Marketing
  • Sales
  • Customer Service
  • Design
  • Development
  • Testing
  • Service Delivery
  • Procurement
  • and of course all the admin stuff like book keeping and reporting to authorities.

We stay on top of all these with Front Office Box.

Marketing

  • Marketing efforts split into two categories
    • bought in services
    • our own activities.

To keep on top of what’s supposed to happen, and when, we use Opportunity Management - with individual projects, each comprising planned actions, deliverables and responsibilities.

Everything due from the supply chain shows up on the dashboard, with who its assigned to. Everything we’re supposed to do ourselves also shows up on the dashboard.

(Collaboration - the next phase of development will allow our partners access to our Opportunity Management through their own Front Office Box).

  • Our Contacts database is segmented with Tags.
  1. Businesses we just have addresses for
  2. our Mailing List
  3. people who’ve looked at our demonstration
  4. registered users
  5. Ambassadors
  6. whole range of people we do business with- lawyers, accountants, consultants etc.
  7. logins for FOB for demonstration and exercise accounts.

Being able to access these easily with Tags is a big help.

  • We use Webrequest in our marketing. Instead of sending out bulk email we send Webrequests. Messages can be tailored for groups and invite lists populated with Tags for groups. Clicking one button sends the job to the server, whilst we do something else. Webrequest lets us do this without broadcasting all our contacts email addresses.

Sales

For the moment, Front Office Box is free, so we aren’t using it for sales as such. But there is a kind of sales process - our Adoption Support

The process starts with either an introduction to our marketing site, a visitor asking for access to the demo system or a registration via the home page.

For each of these starting points there’s a standard process - a series of follow up actions set to happen a number of days after the previous action. We’re trying to build on whatever level of interest our contact initially had, ultimately leading to a commitment to really trying the software in their business. That’s when the “sale” is made.

At the starting point we create an opportunity and add the follow up actions with due dates. All the actions planned at the start point show up on our Dashboard, so we don’t forget anything.

Customer Service

  • We don’t get much call for Customer Service. The software works, so we shouldn’t. When we do get a request from a user, we create a service ticket, assign a series of actions and record our progress. This is typical opportunity management, but we do keep a record by user of support request. We also publish the issues and resolutions in Knowledgebase so everybody can benefit from the detail.
  • We do work hard at communication with our users, especially through the software release process when something new is coming. To keep our users in the picture we use Knowledgebase and Webrequest.
  • All of our Help texts are stored in Knowledgebase and linked to pages in the application.
  • Users are encouraged to join discussions about future developments and share their thoughts with other users.

Projects

We have a lot of these.

Plans for

  • Marketing - Paid Search, Viral and B2B
  • Software development
  • Associations and networks we work with, and
  • The corporate admin stuff

We also have simple ToDo lists so we don’t forget things like car services, payments due, and appointments at the dentists. Having a project for each of our supply chain partners lets us plan their deliverables and assign actions, which show up on the Dashboard.

When we’re looking for feedback we survey with Webrequest. When we’re canvassing opinion to direct the development program, we publish articles in Knowledgebase and use Webrequest to let users know it’s there. They can enter into the discussion, and let everybody else know what they think by posting in Knowledgebase.

When we’re looking for new partners we’ll use Webrequest for Requests for Information and Proposals and Knowledgebase to publish briefings, so everybody can offer proposals based on the same information.

Accounts

No, we use Google Spreadsheets for those, but you never know- watch this space ;-)

Benefits

  1. We do all this with just two people working part time
  2. Users tell us we provide outstanding customer service
  3. There’s never any panic in our business - everything is planned aand happens when its supposed to
  4. We file all of our information where we need to be able to find it
  5. We have a lot of fun, because Front Office Box does what its supposed to, and stays out of our way