I was talking with a friend the other day and had one of those "Oh my Gosh" moments. He was sharing with me a process that one university sells to government and architecture firms.
When an architecture or engineering firm bids a contract, they include numerous references. The entity buying the services faxes this list of references to this company. The company then calls out to the references and documents the reference checks. These are then captured in a word document and tracked in an Excel spreadsheet.
The client finally gets a list of the completed references later in the process.
I gave them some free advice...There is a better way.
- Create an external facing web form where the client (the buyer of the architectural / engineering services) can enter the list of references and their contact information.
- Have this automatically trigger e-mails to the contacts letting them know that you will be contacting them and offering them a web form / questionaire to complete if they prefer to do it via self-service.
- For people that you talk with live, use this same form / questionaire.
- Create a dashboard that is visible internally and the client which shows the status of all the references.
- Have the system create an automatic report that summarizes the data and creates a report aggregating the scores.
Now, wait. I guess if we make it this easy then they go out of business. Well...I guess that is life. I was always taught to engineer yourself out of a job. Here is a great example.
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