FileMaker Pro to the Rescue

Is your business, like so many today, drowning in data? Swamped by inventory, customer, market, and competitive data? This is the story of how one small business used database software to turn a sea of data into customer knowledge worth its weight in gold.

When Andy Frazier arrived at Baron’s Major Brands a year ago, he found a fast-growing appliance retailer that prided itself on providing a positive customer experience in a fiercely competitive market. That meant responding as proactively as possible to customer information, be that praise, complaints, or advice.

Buyers at any of Baron’s five stores in New Hampshire were asked to fill out a postcard describing their overall sales experience. But with hundreds of sales monthly, the results of this effort were stacks and stacks of cards and a few weak attempts to produce pie charts for which managers found little use.

“We needed technology to help us turn all this data into real information so our managers could act quickly and decisively,” recalls Frazier, IT manager at Baron’s.“We needed the magic of FileMaker.”

Having used FileMaker solutions in previous jobs going back several years, Frazier was able to quickly build a front end to receive the data. As quickly and easily, he built a back end capable of producing a variety of custom reports at the store managers’ discretion, and with nothing more than a few mouse clicks.

“It was an amazing revelation,” Frazier says of the managers’ new experience with FileMaker data. “They now get instant alerts that tell them to call a customer or respond to new ideas or thank a customer personally for a big order. We built in an audit trail to make sure we follow up on all customer
issues. This has been huge for Baron’s in fulfilling its mission of keeping the customer experience positive.”

Baron’s has joined thousands of other businesses worldwide that have harnessed and exploited the tremendous potential of FileMaker Pro to develop solutions that delight the customer, drive loyalty, and boost the bottom line with repeat business. And now FileMaker Pro 8.5, which Frazier is beginning to integrate into Baron’s, offers unprecedented power and ease of use in uniting the wide world of Web information with the world’s foremost database solutions.

The star new feature in FileMaker Pro 8.5 is the highly acclaimed Web Viewer. This new feature combines FileMaker database functionality with live Web data to deliver Web data on demand. Web Viewer obviates the need for users to store what is usually instantly obsolete information in their databases because with Web Viewer, users get the very latest Web data within their solutions.

At Baron’s, for example, store managers often have to look up various features and specifications on a very wide variety of appliances, and this data frequently changes. Because much of this data resides on the Web, often in PDF format, the Baron’s users have to click to individual Web sites, search for the information they want, copy it, and then paste it into their spreadsheets or other sales tools.

As Frazier deploys FileMaker Pro 8.5 and the new Web Viewer, things could change dramatically. For starters, Frazier is building a unified FileMaker database as a one-stop shop for managers to see the information they want in one place. He (and eventually the managers themselves) will then build links to the Webbased data they want to access. With Web Viewer, building these links is no more complicated than typing a URL into a dialog box. When a user clicks the link in the future, the most up-to-date information from that link, such as a current set of washing machine specifications, pops up instantly.

Frazier’s plans for FileMaker Pro 8.5 at Baron’s are almost as limitless as the solution itself. “That’s the amazing thing about FileMaker,” Frazier says. “It is so easy to use that managers with a minimum of computer experience can do incredible things on their own with so little training. With a solution like that, you might think you would hit the bottom of its capabilities pretty quickly. But the truth is, that as you gain more experience with it, you can dig deeper and deeper and still not hit bottom. It is almost limitless.”

Looking ahead, Frazier has begun work with the service organization at Baron’s to build a FileMaker Pro database to house service-related information from which managers can extract specialized reports. This project could become the seedbed from which will spring a companywide accounting system based on FileMaker, replacing an aging proprietary system that he says is highly inflexible.

In addition, Frazier is deploying FileMaker Pro to build an intranet containing the company’s HR information, ultimately providing employee selfservice for monitoring vacation time, reviewing benefits, and so on.

Has he considered solutions other than FileMaker for meeting Baron’s information needs? “I had a lot of experience with other solutions and have tried other things,” he concludes. “Getting information in and out of them was like pulling teeth. With FileMaker, it couldn’t be easier.”

[tags]FileMaker, Database[/tags]