Customers: Online Estimates
During the past month, New Leaders debuted our nifty online estimates application for customers. Guess what? Not only does it reduce time and cost elements needed to present our customers with a project estimate, but it has increased our conversion rate, too. We presume they are working better than the original PDF versions for a couple of reasons:
• Changes to an estimate can be requested in real time.
• Selling website development by means of a website.
• Ease with which customers can share and refer back to quotes
• Web links that provide additional information to customers.
• A forward-approach call-to-action to initiate your project today.
At the bottom of our estimates, we incorporated a simple call-to-action allowing customers to make a credit card deposit to start their project. When clicked, the predefined contact information propagates to the subsequent payment form. In a semi-magical process, the form automatically fills your contact information without any additional information or login. These are the little things that not only encourage customers to choose New Leaders, but showcase the detail we invest in the things we create.
Equally important is what online estimates does for our operations. Now that estimates is part of our arsenal (we’ll explain more soon) we can correlate this information with our time logs, invoices, and payments to ensure we more accurately portray a project estimate, in terms of both time and price.
We have developed and utilize a concept we call “Security through obscurity.” Although our estimates are 128-bit SSL encrypted, they don’t require a password to be viewed. The URL itself is a random character string, impossible to guess and non-sequential. This allows clients to share the URL with colleagues via email or chat. We have even seen customers review and approve estimates using their iPhones. We don’t recommend posting the URL to a public site or social network. However, if they are accidentally leaked for one reason or another, we are able to instantly hide the estimate. For those projects that aren’t realized, New Leaders retains control over the estimate and is able to hide it when necessary; something Microsoft Word could never accomplish.
Unfortunately, we reserve our estimate for potential customers. If you are interested in hiring New Leaders for your next project request an estimate by telling us as much as possible about what you want. We’ll contact you to make sure we understand your needs, and develop an online estimate for your review.
Posted on Sep 10, 2008 by Kevin Milden
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