It's Not About Me

For comparison, Amazon was founded in 1994, eBay in 1995, Netflix in 1997, Google (now Alphabet) in 1998, PayPal in 1999, Facebook in 2004 and YouTube in 2005! o EDI … Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) is not a common subject when people think of customer satisfaction, but it can be a critical component among businesses that conduct a lot of transactions between each other. EDI is basically a one-way mainframe computer to computer communication to or from a vendor from their customer. These are frequently automated or programmed communications that transfer data like new orders to vendor from a customer, order status from vendor to customer, inventory availability data, etc. The value of EDI is that it allows a company to extract data from a vendor and/or customer and integrate it in their own computer applications according to how they want the information displayed to their employees. This can be very useful when you are trying to display data from multiple customers and/or vendors and wish to display the info to your employees in some standardized format for their evaluation and use. American Electric began testing EDI with customers in late 1989; Home Depot was one of their first retail sales channel customers to send their orders via EDI. Today, most major customers send at least some of their orders via EDI and there are now over 40 different EDI transaction sets for exchanging data with vendors and customers. EDI not only saves money and time for both the vendor and the customer, but it provides better service for both parties. • Online Stock Check – People may debate over the steps involved in converting a prospect to a customer, but one thing is for certain… at some point in the process, once a decision has been made on WHAT to purchase, the question of WHERE to purchase the item becomes paramount. That is where product availability takes “center stage”. Whether you sell your product directly to an end user or sell your product through distribution or some other middle tier sales structure, ultimately somebody is going to want to know WHEN THEY CAN GET THE ITEM? Many companies produce a variety of items; some items that are sold in high volume and/or to numerous customers might be normally carried in stock while other items might be made on demand by special order only. For stock items, buyers like to know if the item is currently available for immediate purchase; due to unforeseen demand, an item that is normally in stock may be temporarily “out of stock”; likewise, make -to- order (MTO) items normally have a “lead - time” in days or weeks as to how long it will take to produce the item. Also, if you sell your products through distribution or a retail network, that organization may not carry all your items in their inventory, so they will need to know how long it will take to get the subject item(s) for their customer(s) … both availability and shipping time so they can relay this information to THEIR customer! The likelihood

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