Land of Zoho Creator

This is the first post in a series detailing a real-world example of using Zoho Creator as a small business software platform.

Meet Ted

To simplify our early prototyping efforts for BuggyRocket we’ve brought in a customer service representative (CSR) named “Ted” — the affable, well-dressed, incredibly Web 2.0-savvy Ted. In his spare time Ted enjoys sipping lattes, practicing yoga, and skimming the Op-Ed pages of the New York Times. Sometimes all at once. Hey don’t look at us, Mark hired him…

“Thanks for calling BuggyRocket. How can I help you?”

Ted of course is actually just our fictitious end user until one or more real BuggyRocket CSRs take the reins. He telecommutes for Mark via his own fictitious laptop and cellphone, usually either from home or a quiet coffee shop, and is the guy responsible for transforming into hard data all the faxes, phone calls, mailed letters, etc that BuggyRocket receives.

Putting Ted to Work

Ted pretty much has a job description already; Mark breathed life into it just by throwing out his rough ideas in the original post. So our first task toward putting Ted to work is probably to distill those rough ideas into a list of current assumptions so we can communicate them back to Mark (you are reading this Mark, right?) and make sure we’re on the same page:

• Customers
  1. often serviced through traditional mail, fax and phone, not email
  2. if they have a computer, often dial-up
• CSRs
  1. human beings who answer the phone (< -- Ted goes here...)
  2. need to be online to simplify the process
  3. too many will cut into profit margins (Ted is not cheap)
• Backend
  1. provides detailed forms to allow Ted to efficiently input data
  2. supports a database built up by virtue of Ted’s accumulative data entry
  3. needs to process customers’ payments
  4. converts the data into XML feeds or other formats and submits to seller sites on demand

Step One

As Mark mentioned in his last post, I already created one simple form that Ted could conceivably use to submit a new Real Estate listing. But it suffers from several drawbacks, not least of which is a detailed presentation crammed onto one long page. It’s really just our first step toward deploying a system Ted can reliably use to process, record, and publish all of BuggyRocket’s critical information.

In the next post we’ll clarify a high-level process model for moving the input (customer data) to the output (BuggyRocket’s database and seller web sites), as well as incorporate additional feedback from Mark. And perhaps Ted.