Tag Archives: customers
Wholesale Distributors Meeting 21st Century Challenges
Expanding Services Margin Upside
Product margins vary for Wholesale Distributors, based on products, territories, and their own efficiencies. But clearly, service margins are usually much higher. Along with outsourcing, manufacturers are also closing branch offices and service depots. Businesses don’t want the head count or the challenges associated with the resource management of diverse and remote facilities, logistics, and people.
That represents the upside for the wholesale distributor! Local market knowledge, the strength and weakness of the product catalog, and insight can be provided into the types of services that customers need. Today, many brand companies clearly know that their channel partners are the ‘sales and service arms’ of their companies. And many have put large investments in place, from sales training to product installation, repair training and certification.
For call centre management, this capability can also be leveraged to support clients’ businesses. Again, instead of making the WD just a cost centre to manage customer interactions, it can become another service and a source of revenue.
Manufacturing services are playing a great part in the distributor’s business model. From light ‘kitting’ and assembly to custom value-added-reseller (VAR) services, the proximity to customer markets, again, allows the WD to open discussion on these higher margin activities. Once the WD is in the ‘manufacturing game,’ customer-specific services such as configuration management, pre-loaded software and installation can all be done.
Diversity and Multi-channel
A big challenge for the WD is managing diverse methods for customer sales and self-service options, often called multi-channel. This is the ability to provide a ‘single face to the customer’ regardless of their preferred shopping methoddirect sales, web, catalog, phone or showroom. Often, established customers use multiple channels. This is a huge issue if the processes, system and business tools can’t identify this customer and assure that all the appropriate services and agreements are instantly known. Does the sales person in the showroom know that this customer is entitled to a 30% discount? Does the system know that this customer, when ordering on-line, has higher priority when allocating scarce product? Can the 3rdparty warehouse have access to all the proper labeling and shipping information?
Foundationally, today’s WDs should be old pros at this type of challenge. Right?
Added to this are the complexity and diversity of the services, priorities, pricing, and ‘deals’ unique to each customer. In addition to providing transparency in sales and fulfillment, the WD’s business accounting software and billing system has to be precise, productive and transparent to the customer. Too often WDs are filled with paper tracking down pricing complaints, dealing with charge-back and settlements with customers, with no audit trail of transactions and service add-ons. Making the sale, only to lose margins in poor paperwork and ‘give backs’ to customers, who clearly did not really earn those discounts, is an all too familiar story. Diversity can cost. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
How does Web application security affect me?
Web Applications are compromised daily and now account for the majority of vulnerabilities on the Internet.
Web application weaknesses are a major way that cyber criminals, working with hacking techniques, can steal sensitive data. With this data, nefarious crooks can affect companies and individuals alike; there is little distinction between Fortune 500 Companies and an end user with a credit card. They often just follow the path of least resistance.
Online data theft is not a game. While some hackers will brag about having breached the security of a web application and gained access to sensitive data, the criminals have money, not bragging rights in their cross-hairs. Extortion is sometimes the name of the game. If data can be held at ransom by thieves, depending on how sensitive the data is, they can demand a huge sum of money.
The ways that companies and individuals are affected by web application attacks are numerous. Imagine this “what if” situation. A large Fortune 500 company is attacked by an orchestrated attack and the credit card numbers are taken and held at ransom by an organized crime group. Word gets out and the Fortune 500 company under goes a huge investigation and security audit. The clients and customers of the company lose trust in the security of the company and start taking their business elsewhere. The company then starts losing revenue and the customers begin to find that their credit cards are being charged illegally. The credit card companies are involved and are losing money as well. Nobody is immune to these web application attacks, whether its large company or one individual.
As programmers design web applications to be more accessible and easy to use, often these features are targets for crime groups to attack. Programmers must protect their applications by following secure coding practices to filter out any attacks and create a safe place for their clients customers to do business.
One of the major ways hackers breach a web application are through SQL injection attacks. SQL injection attacks can be used to access sensitive data or do any number of destructive things to the data stored in the web application’s database. Cross-site scripting attacks are also prevalent. This attack occurs when malicious code is inserted and executed when a user loads an infected page. Denial of service attacks are also popular. This happens when the network hosting a web application is swamped with useless requests sent out by the criminals which creates so much traffic that the network or system crashes.
Its a wild world out there…
How does Web application security affect me?
Web Applications are compromised daily and now account for the majority of vulnerabilities on the Internet.
Web application weaknesses are a major way that cyber criminals, working with hacking techniques, can steal sensitive data. With this data, nefarious crooks can affect companies and individuals alike; there is little distinction between Fortune 500 Companies and an end user with a credit card. They often just follow the path of least resistance.
Online data theft is not a game. While some hackers will brag about having breached the security of a web application and gained access to sensitive data, the criminals have money, not bragging rights in their cross-hairs. Extortion is sometimes the name of the game. If data can be held at ransom by thieves, depending on how sensitive the data is, they can demand a huge sum of money.
The ways that companies and individuals are affected by web application attacks are numerous. Imagine this “what if” situation. A large Fortune 500 company is attacked by an orchestrated attack and the credit card numbers are taken and held at ransom by an organized crime group. Word gets out and the Fortune 500 company under goes a huge investigation and security audit. The clients and customers of the company lose trust in the security of the company and start taking their business elsewhere. The company then starts losing revenue and the customers begin to find that their credit cards are being charged illegally. The credit card companies are involved and are losing money as well. Nobody is immune to these web application attacks, whether its large company or one individual.
As programmers design web applications to be more accessible and easy to use, often these features are targets for crime groups to attack. Programmers must protect their applications by following secure coding practices to filter out any attacks and create a safe place for their clients customers to do business.
One of the major ways hackers breach a web application are through SQL injection attacks. SQL injection attacks can be used to access sensitive data or do any number of destructive things to the data stored in the web application’s database. Cross-site scripting attacks are also prevalent. This attack occurs when malicious code is inserted and executed when a user loads an infected page. Denial of service attacks are also popular. This happens when the network hosting a web application is swamped with useless requests sent out by the criminals which creates so much traffic that the network or system crashes.
Its a wild world out there…