Land of Zoho Creator

This is the second post in a series detailing a real-world example of using Zoho Creator as a small business software platform. In the first installment we introduced Ted, clarified our assumptions, and showed an example form.

Sketching out how BuggyRocket will help offline customers post their items online is still preliminary and a bit messy but the effort does help us clarify for Mark and ourselves how we plan on things fitting together. First, a somewhat jumbled diagram:

The customer sees a BuggyRocket print add, remembers he’s trying to sell his house, and calls the 800 number. Then a bunch of stuff happens. Ted takes the call, receives content from the customer, and completes all the data entry (using Zoho Creator). In case you can’t tell that’s Mark in the lower left, keeping tabs on his business and interacting directly with Ted or his customer if needed. Remember, the customer by definition isn’t online so interacting with him or her means going to the phone, fax, or post office.

A simple swim lane diagram hopefully makes the “best case” or “happy path” process more clear:

Starting in the upper left above, the process is triggered when the customer makes the phone call. It completes when the customer’s listing is published online. The sequence transpires something like this:

1. Customer makes phone call
2. CSR notes call/explains product
3. Customer orders product
4. CSR enters order
5. Backend validates/stores order
6. Backend publishes listing

While all that’s going on, at certain steps other observations and conversations are taking place. Mark is monitoring things as he can, Ted reports back status to the customer as requested, etc. It’s a purposefully trivial process at this point: we aren’t illustrating any exceptions or errors, we just want to understand how this thing is supposed to work.

In the next post we’ll get down to the nitty gritty with Zoho Creator by starting work on a system that can help Ted take an order and automatically post something to Google Base.