Nivek

Nivek has won the Food Packaging Award 7 times!

“We go out of our way for each and every customer – service is our number one differentiator” says Debbie. How to make sure this level of service is improved by an e-commerce service for our customers was the biggest challenge.

“If I am honest, we put off the decision for a long time because we thought it would be complicated and time consuming to do, would our customers even use it?”

“We knew we needed to invest in an e-commerce site. We were uploading a lot of orders manually from phone calls and emails. We also input a lot of orders from our customer’s procurement systems.”

The e-commerce site needed to be easy to use for all their customers as well as a wish list that included:

• Easy to set up and go live – “we just don’t have enough time to spend months on it!”
• Must integrate with our Sage 200 system.
• Not at all complicated to use.
• Jargon free!
• Pictures and descriptions are placed together.
• Not too much pointless wording and the smallest number of clicks to make placing orders simple.
• Must be able to import all our data from Sage.
• Customer details, prices, discounts, products all to be uploaded from our existing Sage system.

Nivek chose GOb2b’s unique eCommerce platform which gives them a very visual, feature rich website that made it easy for customers to order their products but also easy to see which other products they also sell.

“Chefs are busy people and they need to be able to constantly and easily add to their basket on-the-fly as they think, rather than having to make a paper list and then buy later. They can then just place an order from their basket with everything saved when they are ready.”

“It’s so easy, search is brilliant, our customers love it and there are not a lot of clicks.”

The Nivek site is image rich with descriptions right next to the images. All product and customer pricing with shipping details is synchronised with Sage which stops double manual entry.

Stock is also live synchronised with Sage so our customers know straight away what we have.”

“The alternatives feature is great so if we are out of stock for any reason the site automatically suggests an alternative.” Says Debbie.

“We set up Gob2b’s agent feature so that our people can input our customer’s favourites, show them products, talk them through it and if needed even place the order for them.”

IT’S OPENED UP A BIG OPPORTUNITY

“Our customers now order 24/7 – they are always busy, and we have seen lots of orders now on Saturdays and Sundays.

Customers are now ordering from us products they didn’t know we sold before like fridges, freezers and ovens.”

VISIBILITY ACROSS CUSTOMERS AND STOCK

“We can now analyse what the customers are buying and how they buy it, what their favourites are, all of their back orders and what they put in their baskets. This has really helped us to know what stock to order.

The information from the reports we get from Gob2b has brought to the fore a lot of knowledge about our products, what alternatives there are, what our customers want and what stock we should be holding.”

THE TEAM LOVE IT

“The team absolutely love it. It’s not complicated and it has meant that they can spend more time with the customers rather than just entering orders into Sage.

It has saved us so much time.

We have also started to use it as a training tool about our products for our people because all the knowledge about the products is right there. It has meant we have been able to internally promote our people and they can use the site as a training tool to get up to speed quickly.”

PERONAL CUSTOMER SERVICE

Debbie tells us that their customer reviews have told them “It’s just so easy! Search is brilliant. It’s been easy for us to sign up to and get started – we are soooo impressed!!”

The personal service that Nivek has provided is not lost and the customer service team can now spend even more time helping both customers and sales.

BUILT TO GROW

The GOb2b platform creates sites which are built to last with regular updates as part of the monthly fee as well as support from our team of experts during the life-time of the site.

“The Gob2b team have been amazing, response is very quick when we have questions. They listen to all of our many ideas and help us put them into action. It has worked both ways and has been a real partnership – they have been really honest with us.”

A LEARNING EXPERIENCE

The .csv upload was great to get started and save time on importing all the product data.

Having both images and descriptions right next to each other has worked well for the customers and for the team. An unexpected benefit has been that the site is also now a learning tool for alternatives and for our people to multi-skill across the company.

We learnt a lot on how to make it easy for customers to sign up. We used the agent feature for this so our team can walk customers through it for the first time.

25% of all sales were going through the site within a couple of months and the take up pretty much doubled each month.

We love the pop-up feature that means we can promote things quickly to our customers.

WHAT’S NEXT?

Debbie and the team have lots of ideas for next steps! Keeping the site fresh with even more images and what’s new, more graphical and jazzed up promotions to connect with the customers.

The use of QR codes to sign up not just for the site but for new products.

Sales and customer service people can see their own groups of customers and act on their behalf through the agent functionality.

We love Debbie’s idea of the pop-up “e-surprises” and promotions – watch this space!