An account manager's inbox
By ten in the morning there are fifteen emails. How many of the navy medium do we have? Has the container from last Thursday been booked in yet? Why has order 10432 not shipped? Can you send me a stock report, the one with the values in it? Each question takes a few minutes: log in to the WMS, find the client, run a report, export it, tidy it up, reply.
The irony is that the client has a login to your WMS portal. They find it confusing, it uses your location and status codes, and it does not show the thing they want, which is usually a plain answer to one question.
Why the portal does not stop the emails
Client portals that come with a WMS are built by the WMS vendor to show what the system holds, in the system's own terms. Clients think in their own terms: available to sell, on its way, stuck, finished.
| What the client asks | What the WMS portal shows |
|---|---|
| How much can I sell today? | On hand, allocated, quarantined and damaged in separate columns |
| Has my delivery arrived? | A receipt status code |
| Why has this order not gone? | An order status that does not say what it is waiting for |
| What is my stock worth? | Nothing, because cost prices are not in the WMS |
| What is about to run out? | Nothing, unless they build their own report |
So clients do the reasonable thing and ask a person. Every new client adds to the queue.
The cost of being the answering service
Account managers should be spending time on the relationship: forecasting, peak planning, problems before they happen. Instead the job becomes answering questions the data could answer. Response times slip as the client base grows, and slow answers feel like poor service even when the warehouse is running well.
Answers given by hand also vary. Two people asked the same question can pull different reports and give different numbers.
What we build for your clients
- A connection to your WMS that reads stock, receipts and orders per client through its API or database views.
- A plain client view: stock available to sell, stock on hold with the reason, receipts expected and completed, orders by where they are stuck.
- Scheduled reports in the layout each client wants, sent by email or dropped into their shared folder, including values if they give you cost prices.
- Alerts they can choose: stock below a level they set, a receipt booked in, an order on hold for more than a set time.
- A question box that answers simple stock and order questions from live data, using a language model limited to that client's records, with anything it cannot answer passed to the account manager.
- Access control so each client only ever sees their own data, with logins managed by you.
We can build this as a separate client site under your own brand, which is also a better thing to show prospects than the WMS vendor's portal.
A quieter inbox
Clients get the common answers without waiting, and account managers get the questions that need a person. The numbers clients see come from one place, so everyone is working from the same figures.
Is this your account team's day?
- Clients email for stock reports that someone exports by hand.
- Your WMS portal exists but few clients use it.
- Account managers answer 'where is my order' questions for clients, not just consumers.
- Clients learn about low stock when orders start backordering.
- Different staff give clients different numbers for the same thing.