Communication – Enquiries – Feedback – Help – Online Orders

A website can be far more than just an advertisement or shop window for your products or services. Whilst having an in-house server to host your website may be beyond your budget at present it is still possible for visitors to your site to communicate with you and it is at this level that websites really come into their own. Forms that your visitors can fill in could provide them with answers to technical questions, or take enquiries from them for printed material or further information, or ask them for feedback, or take new orders. In fact practically any customer related process that you are use to handling over the phone or fax can be simulated in one way or another.

Enquiry Forms and Feedback Forms that use e-mail to send the form content back to you provide the simplest way of providing a visitor with a means with which to communicate with you. Deram can provide you with a form reader that will enable you to view an enquiry on a desktop machine in your office before deciding what action needs to be taken. This piece of software can also be configured to add enquiry data to a database if you want to store the information and follow it up at a future date. A similar form facility can be designed to get useful feedback from visitors and customers that could help with market research or service improvement projects.

If your staff spend a lot of time dealing with technical queries from customers and potential customers you can free up valuable hours by installing a help system on your website. A database that deals with frequently asked questions (FAQs) can be designed with search facilities that will enable visitors to find answers to many of the questions that they are likely to ask.

E-Commerce is receiving a lot of attention from the media at present. Everything from your groceries to antique furniture can be ordered over the web these days. The final section of this guide deals with on-line ordering facilities.