While in Sweden to watch our junior’s try to reclaim hockey gold, I had an interesting experience in a Swedish grocery store. Most of the customers were walking around with hand held scanners that were available at the store’s entrance. When I asked one of the employees what the scanners were for, I was told that the customers could take a scanner, swipe their credit card and then scan each item as they put it in their basket. When they finished shopping the scanner billed their items to their credit card.

The customers loved the scanners as they removed the need to line up to pay for their groceries and the employee I spoke with loved the devices as it meant he didn’t have to work as a checkout cashier, a task he considered repetitious and tedious.  Instead, he spent his time interacting with customers, helping them find their items and answering any questions they had about their products. He told me “I really enjoy helping customers and now that’s what I spend most of my time doing”.

Helping Customers By Helping Employees

These scanners were a very innovative use of technology. By eliminating the need for multiple cashiers the grocery store was saving money and they improved their customers’ experience by having staff more available to give a personal touch to their customers. Your intranet is used in a very similar manner. By automating the routine and time consuming tasks in an employee’s day, by making resources easily available and by giving your employees more time to focus on your customers, you can improve your customers’ satisfaction without having to make additional investment in staffing.

A effective business intranet is a tool for combining resources in one central location to increase the ease with which your employees complete tasks, therefore improving the efficiency of your business.  Rather than spending their time finding documents, communicating with coworkers, filling out paper forms, making photocopies and so forth, your employees can spend their time focusing on something much more important. The cornerstone of your business, the key to your success and the reason why your company is still standing: Your Customers.

Here are just a few intranet resources which will lead to huge time-cost savings within your organization:

• Form Builder: Move paper forms online to reduce printing, increase the speed of filling out forms and greatly increase workflow time.
• Document Repository: Upload your forms onto the intranet to reduce time looking for the most up-to-date versions.
• Employee Directory: Increase the time it takes to look up coworker contact information.  Send them an email directly from their mini-card.
• Department Sites: Post departmental information in a central Department Site to reduce the number of employee emails to sort through.
• Corporate Contacts: Post all corporate contacts in a central repository online to reduce the upkeep of contact information and allow for easy access.
• Mobile Intranet: Allow your employees to access the intranet from out of the office to update forms or find important documents.
• Employee Training: Allow employees to view a central calendar and sign up for classes online – track registration easily and automatically.

We all recognize that great customer service dramatically improves customer satisfaction and customer retention. By using your Intranet as a tool to better utilize your employee’s time, you allow them more time to focus on more skilled tasks, including creating and maintaining happier customers. And that is a great, and financially rewarding, use of technology.

To find out how Intranet Connections can help to improve your business processes and increase your customer satisfaction, request a demo of our business intranet software.