How E-commerce can reduce cycle time, improve employees's empowerment and facilitate customer support

With the increasing usage of internet and the advancement of technology, more and more people are starting to see the convenience of e-commerce. With e-commerce, people can make purchases without even stepping out of their house. What differentiate e-commerce apart from the conventional way of selling and buying is reduced cycle time and the convenience.

Cycle time is the time where a process needed to complete from beginning until the end of it. This system can help to reduce the cycle time by creating a fast and direct system without wasting any valuable time. For example, customers can get immediate responses from the dealers or the supplier once the customers request to purchase the items on the system. From the system, it will immediately get to the suppliers without wasting time and money to go to the shop and they can make the payment online through credit cards. After the company receives the orders and payment, they will prepares the items accordingly and send it to the customers. Thus, the e-commerce can reduce the cycle time of this process.

Besides reduced cycle time, e-commerce allows employees to make decisions. Empowerment by management to employees (especially customer service) can react quickly to solve customers demands or problems. They also need to check on the system and process any transactions that requested by the customers. With empowerment, customer satisfaction will be increased due to the swift respond from the company personnel and thus increasing the usage of e-commerce.

Other than that, e-commerce is basically done on web sites. The advantage of the web site is that it can serve several purposes to facilitate the buying process. An added advantage to e-commerce is that customers can also seek help and advice from customer support. Any doubts and uncertainty can be cleared and verified via the customer support.