Web and Mobile Ticketing and Service Tracking for Customer Engagement of a Small Accounting Firm

The abundance of free technology tools that can be used to communicate of today's businesses are in way creating more confusion and redundant tasks which is not good for a striving small business. The study aims to serve as a single platform of communication tool for a small accounting firm, a website and mobile application were developed which are the capable of providing an online ticketing which can respond to customer concerns, a service tracking, and a tool that can aggregate reports of the firm's performance in providing services in the form of charts. Web Development Life Cycle (WDLC) was used as the process model in the development of the website and mobile application. Interview validated the business processes and supported the design of web and mobile applications. Development tools used for website and mobile application are Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP), Android and MySQL for database. In order to evaluate the performance of the developed system, a usability evaluation was conducted with the customers and employees of the accounting firm using the criteria: communication, transaction, aesthetics, ease of use, information and maintainability. Evaluation result shows that majority of customers strongly agree on the efficiency of communication and transaction functionalities of the developed system with the need in the improvement of image and text. Meanwhile, the evaluation of website's back-end shows promising result as well with mostly strongly agreement except for the transaction criterion wherein the employees who used the developed system had difficulty in using the system. Overall, the visual components, management of tickets, management of service tracking and viewing of the aggregate reports in the form of charts are all beneficial to a small business so that they could focus on their core business and use the developed website and application in customer engagement.