Our eCommerce company is growing tremendously. We're up 40% this year. We sell countertop kitchen appliances, gadgets, cookware, etc. We also warehouse 90% of our items (20,000 sku's from 240 vendors). The problem is that we've got 40 employees divided into the various departments. Managing the brand strategy is a collaboration between marketing, new product purchasing, restock purchasing, content creation, and price updates (all departments). I want to begin using Slack (I've used on dozens of other teams) and some other integrations. Above all, we need to be able to interact with the brand as the central component. We should be able to field an email from a vendor that concerns some or all of these departments and focus the dissemination of that information within a silo that contains only that brand. From there, we should be able to assign tasks around it (price update, order new product, etc), or memorialize our interaction with the brand's representatives in a WIKI style format that helps develop our ongoing brand strategy. In case I'm not clear, I'll restate. An email comes in from a brand rep, perhaps it contains a buy-in opportunity or a price change or the notes about the discontinuation of a SKU. I want to push that information into a silo that contains just the brand, but allows each department to interact with other departments regarding that brand. Please help!
I am not sure that I understood your question entirely but based on my interpretation I would suggest taking a deep look at Teamwork. (https://www.teamwork.com/) Teamwork is a software platform designed to help organize a company and help it manage tasks and projects. The Teamwork package consists of 3 products.
Teamwork Chat - This similar to slack minus a few features. Teamwork Chat includes a direct integration with the rest of the Teamwork system. This allows members of your company to communicate in real-time, create rooms, and share project details all in a permanently recorded environment.
Teamwork Desk - This is a great ticketing system that allows external parties to have tracked email communication with reps. This may be the avenue where you deposit incoming inquiries. Your brand management reps could get the inquiry via desk and then turn it into a variety of tasks for various departments in Teamwork Projects. As tasks are completed they can use Teamwork Desk to communicate back to the customer. This software includes a portal where these reps can log-in and see their entire account/request history with the organization and a help desk that would allow you to create self service help docs for your products/services/store if necessary.
Teamwork Projects - Teamwork Projects is a project management software that allows you to create users, departments, and even allow client access into the system. You can develop projects, tasks, timelines, and calendars based on those elements. You can easily send tasks into Teamwork projects from desk and then route communication back to desk as projects are completed.
Overall, it sounds like this would be a great combination of tools to help you manage your products and brand. I am not a representative of the company nor do I get paid for this recommendation, in fact, I pay them as a user and I use these tools to accomplish something very similar at my company. They have some great videos. Check it out and see if it would be a good fit.
Answered 8 years ago
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