Flooring by Design is the premier flooring retailer of Chicago’s Northwest Suburbs. Having grown to three locations and thousands of customers, the company came to Intechnic seeking an Internet solution that would serve two distinct purposes. One of the goals was to provide their existing and potential customers, end consumers and residential developers, with information about their company, products, locations, and promotions. Another was to facilitate Customer and Supplier Relationship Management (CRM / SRM).
Flooring By Design artists collaborated with Intechnic to create a contemporary graphic design that is unique yet very straight forward. The design was then processed by Intechnic and converted into page templates that were integrated into Intechnic’s Content Management System. This system, controlled via the website’s administrative console, allows for effortless updates of the text and graphic content in designated sections of the website. The system also performs on-the-fly formation of additional website pages and population of their content – Flooring By Design will use this functionality as they expand the number of their retail locations and the informational resources they choose to make available to the website users. Because the system is completely web based it is very accessible to all Flooring By Design content contributors, yet completely unavailable to other users of the administrative console because of the configuration of the Permission System.
The Permission System is what makes it possible for all backend functionality to be centralized into a single interface without compromising security. The system controls read and write access to all of the sections and functions of the administrative console. When website administrators create user accounts, they designate the permissions those users will have by assign them to one of the access levels. With this permission system, administrative level users can access the CRM and SRM features, perform all administrative functions, and update website content. However, sales staff throughout the retail locations uses employee level accounts, and are restricted to the features.
The CRM and SRM are systems that enable users to store, sort, and filter information about Flooring By Design customers and suppliers. The system organizes all of the information in data grids and supports filtration by one or multiple criteria such as zip code or phone area code. The sorting functionality is further extended with customizable sort codes. In addition to data grids, the system allows users to view the data through Excel or any other spreadsheet application by exporting into CSV file format. The system can even generate and print mailing labels automatically filtering out customers who have requested to be excluded from the direct mailing campaigns.
At the conclusion of the project, Intechnic Corporation successfully imported hundreds of customer records from various order processing and CRM systems previously maintained by Flooring By Design.