We met with Jon, Co-owner of Peachtree Catering a few years ago. A month ago, I got another call from him with a question that appeared simple. He wanted a form embedded into his website and we had done the same thing for him a few years ago.
Jon is using the Catering software called Infor SCS, previously called Reserve Interactive. I will refer to this catering software from now on as SCS. His sales force wanted web-based leads from all venues going into SCS so that Peachtree could streamline customer management. Additionally, SCS has a great lead management tool. SCS made the job easy by providing us with the form, so the only thing left was to change the appearance of the form and embed it into Peachtree’s website.
For our customers we act more like an IT business partner than purely coders. After discussing with my group, we had another meeting with Jon to ensure we fully understood what he was trying to achieve this time around.
We had two potential solutions:
Solution 1: We could simply embed the form of SCS into Peachtree’s site and change the appearance as much as possible to blend in with the Peachtree website. I would think a high percent of SCS users will be using this solution and it will work great for them. This is the solution that Jon had utilized previously when he needed an embedded form.
Solution 2: We could use the form that Peachtree had designed on their website and transfer the data into SCS lead. Peachtree had spent time and money to create their website and design their form with customer experience in mind and wanted to maintain that usability. We had prior experience with SCS API when we were doing a similar implementation at MIT. SCS was an incredible help in that implementation, but that is a story for another blog post.
Our goal was to keep the perfect harmony between Peachtree’s customer experience on their website and still deliver the leads into the SCS Sales team so that they can do their job. We sometimes try to decide what is best for the customers; that decision can involve price, time, design, etc. I encourage everyone to proceed with caution as giving a little more time to the customer can lead to new insights. Initially I recommended that Peachtree Catering use the SCS form, as this was the simpler, cheaper option and was less prone to any data loss. However, after discussing more with the client, it turned out that Solution 2, using their own designed form was better for their needs. This option capitalized on the user experience they had developed on their website as well as enabled them to collect customized data.
We proceeded with Solution 2 and made sure their form integrated seamlessly with SCS.