Meeting Notes 22/08/2023

Presentation

Introduction

Move from the old to the new portal. Old website was bespoke and falling apart. The system used to fall over every Monday and we needed a more robust system that would see us through into the future.

We moved our online platform to ‘Netalogue’ (owned by Truecommerce). Truecommerce is a much bigger company who also provide our EDI and PIM (product information) solutions. Many other companies from a variety of different industries use the Netalogue portal and the system will continue to evolve over time. We can work with Truecommerce closely moving forward to develop the site ongoing.

Challenges of the migration

• LWC have multiple stock holdings (depots) due to the size of our business, and one customer could have access to different stock holdings. This makes us quite unique and causes a core complexity that affects many aspects of online ordering.
• Trinity is an old system, in some ways rigid in design, and can be challenging to integrate with.
• We have tens of thousands of customers with many different types of customer setups, so a one-size-fits-all approach doesn’t work.
• During migration we had both the old and new websites running side-by-side which made all support processes much more complex and time-consuming.

Future

We are introducing a new internal resource centre for online champions. This will contain information on server status, scheduled maintenance, known bugs/issues, internal process guides relating to online setup, meeting notes and other useful information to help online champions.

If you encounter an issue with the website and it’s already logged as a ‘Known issue’ then you don’t need to tell us. If it’s not logged then email Web Support with the issue.

Phase 2 of development is aimed to enhance the customer experience, and we will continue to add further enhancements ongoing into the future. Online champions will be vital for providing feedback and shaping/prioritising these enhancements.

The team

• Austin - Oversees day-to-day running of the platform and second line support.
• Richard - Head of the department and online strategy.
• Jonathan - Works with the developers and tests bug fixes and enhancements.
• Abbey - First line support and will often be the main point of contact for online champions via the web support email.

New online champion role

• Account setup and registering users (new form in place and seems to be working well but feedback appreciated).
• Idea is to have champions focused on getting people to order online rather than being tech support / troubleshooting issues. Online resources will help to sell the features to customers.
• We also need to be able to keep customers online in addition to signing people up.
• Ambitious goal is to get 80% of customers ordering online.

A poll was ran during the meeting asking attendees how frequently these types of calls between champions and the online team should be.

Stats

Shows online sales are up year-on-year.

The number of trading customers over the last few months during migration has also increased. This is fantastic considering migration can be frustrating for customers, and our focus has been on migration instead of growth.

Platform walkthrough

On login, customer can choose the venue they want to access.

‘Welcome back’ landing page – intro message has a link to the help centre, and the page contains useful tools available to help customers order and access other parts of the site.

Navigating products – menu at the top to browse through product categories, or use the search bar which is much more advanced than the old portal. Can add products to favourites from category page or product page.

Product page – much more information compared to the old portal, enhanced descriptions, food pairings, brand story, allergens, etc.

Basket – choose your delivery date, add a reference number. Can save the basket for later or proceed to checkout.

Checkout – choose payment method (driven by Trinity setup), confirm customer details, add delivery instructions. Final review page before placing the order.

My Account page –

• Switch to linked account to be able to change the delivery point you’re ordering for.
• Statement of account: see invoices/credits/payment, can download PDF copies of documents.
• My Favourites: choose a filter first (otherwise page will take a long time to load hundreds of products). Simply add to basket from here. Buttons at the bottom to remove items and other options.

Promotions – accessible from the top menu bar. Add qualifying products to basket, and then claim free stock. Some promotions add into basket automatically, and as quantities change the claimed items will scale up automatically.

Questions/issues from online champions

Q: Sometimes an order will be placed after the 3pm cut-off but the customer still expects it next-day.

A: The customer can still choose any day for delivery but the order will be marked as “off-schedule” which means it’s not guaranteed and is therefore depot discretion whether they can fulfil it next day or not. This should be stated on the order confirmation email that the customer gets. If there is an issue here then please email web support with a specific example so that we can investigate exact timings etc.

Q: Is there an option for customers to submit ‘product requests’ like on the old portal?

A: There is a ‘product request’ option in the footer of the portal, but an enhancement is coming in phase 2 to make this better, whereby there will be a link on every product page and clicking it will prepopulate a request form that can be submitted to the depot.

Q: Are all brochure offers available online because some customers are saying they can’t get the discounted prices?

A: Yes but we can’t just have price overrides anymore. Instead the customer must select the cheaper ‘promo’ product in the promotions section to get the cheaper price. This is because there are some scenarios where a customer could have a cheaper negotiated price compared to our offer price. So therefore it is important for customers to have the option to choose between the regular product and the promo product and pick which is cheaper for them.

This change is not because of the portal migration but because promo price codes were introduced into Trinity, instead of discounting the regular code which we did before.

Customer feedback from online champions

Q: At the moment an online account gets disabled when on credit stop. Is it possible that they can still be granted access to the online account but not be able to place an order?

A: We are looking into this already and what work is involved to change this. Following feedback from depots we think the new process should be that the customer can place an order and then it’s down to the depot to decide whether to fulfil it once the order has come through. This involves development changes to the portal which we are investigating.

Comment: Support is good – feeding issues in centrally works very well.

Q: Credit limit available is showing online and don’t know why it’s on there. Can we switch off credit limits?

A: Sue Rogan is emailing depot managers to get feedback on whether we should just switch this off for everyone. This should be a relatively quick change if we reach a consensus.

Comment: Credit stop causing issues (as above).

Q: Orders say “pay by card” when they haven’t.

A: We’re not aware of any issues here so please email some examples to Web Support so we can investigate.

Q: 3pm cut-off for next-day delivery doesn’t work for Widnes, can this be changed?

A: Unfortunately this is a business wide setting so the cut-off time would need to be agreed by all depots. When previously asked the majority of depots requested 3pm.

Q: When customer first logs on for the first time there’s no button to ‘place an order’ like on the old site. Can this be added?

A: The new site works the other way around; add products to the basket and checkout. This is in keeping with every other shopping website experience. Whilst this is different to the old website we believe the new way makes much more sense and is simply a case of existing customers getting used to the new way.

Q: Can favourites be loaded in for new customers?

A: Yes we can do that centrally, just email the list of products to Web Support and indicate which user needs them adding.

Q: When are the account managers getting access? Customers are asking account managers how to do things online but account manager doesn’t know how it works.

A: We’re creating a ‘features and benefits’ PDF which also details the customer journey. This will be provided to all account managers and online champions to help ‘sell’ the online experience.

We will also train account managers how to do the basics of placing an order in the near future. However this won’t be done with test/demo account, and we don’t want customers sharing their passwords for security.

However we are happy for account managers to sit down with customers while the customer logs into their account.

We will also look to provide a demo video of how the website looks which can be shown to prospect customers.

Q: Can there be a message telling the customer that they are on credit stop and that’s why their account is disabled? There’s also a 24 hour wait when taken off stop which causes problems.

A: As previously discussed we’re looking into changing this process.

Q: Can the customer see a total balance of their invoices so they know the total they owe us?

A: Yes, click the tick box next to each invoice in ‘Pay My Invoices’ (located from My Account page) and it says how much is payable in total.

Q: Orders sometimes get split when reaching Trinity. Why is this and can it be stopped?

A: This happens when the customer has managed to order some items that are out-of-stock. The split happens on the product lines that are being put onto ‘back order’ due to no stock. We think it happens when a customer has had products sat in their basket for a long time before placing the order, and in that time some items have gone out of stock. We think there should be a final stock check when the customer clicks Place Order. We are aware of this issue and the developers are investigating.

Q: Can depots have a demo/test account that they can log in with to see the website?

A: Unfortunately each customer is setup slightly different, so if we give out a test account then what you see may be different to what the customer is seeing, and therefore it would be all too easy to give out wrong advice. This will be a bad experience for the customer. However if we deal with all support issues centrally then we have full admin access to view each customers setup and see exactly what they see. We will also have the technical knowledge of how accounts are setup in the background and be able to deal with some issues very quickly if it’s a simple setting change our end so we can fix problems faster. A better customer experience in terms of support.

Q: It’s not clear what to do when you log in for the first time. Where does the customer start? Quick Ordering Features guide in the help centre is good.

A: Each customer will want to order differently depending on their business setup and what they find easiest for them. We will look into highlighting the Quick Ordering Features more and how we can make it more obvious what to do first.

Q: Credit stop change makes sense. However then customers who haven’t traded with us for a long time would be able to still place an order without updated account forms. What can be done here?

A: We’re going to change internet account numbers in Trinity to be a checkbox instead which effectively indicates if they are allowed to order online or not. This can be unticked which will disable their online account and could be used going forward to close down accounts that haven’t traded with us in a while and have outdated account forms.

Q: Password reset emails are not always reaching customers, can this be fixed?

A: We’ve had issues with this in the past where customers try to reset a password for a username that doesn’t exist, and therefore won’t receive an email. It is best that if customers are having issues resetting their passwords for them to raise a ticket with web support directly so we can see if their user actually exists. We can then register them as a new user if required.

Q: Gas deposit charges are being duplicated, can this be fixed?

A: This is a Trinity issue (there’s a program behind the scenes which is needed for cash on delivery customers). However the online portal also needs to be able to take payment when the order is placed. Therefore the deposit gets applied in two places. This is on a list for our internal developers to fix when they have time.

Comment: New system is going to be brilliant but currently having some problems with credit stop.

Q: Some customers are reporting they are submitting support tickets but are not receiving a response?

A: Support tickets are normally picked up by Abbey and Austin quickly and our new ticketing system makes it difficult for tickets to be missed. It could be that they are emailing an incorrect email address instead of actually raising a ticket. If you have a specific example of a customer saying this then please email the details to web support and we’ll investigate.

Q: Are there any incentives for customers to order online? Matthew Clark had 70% of customers ordering online by having online-only deals.

A: We’re focusing on bug fixes right now and immediate enhancements to improve the experience of existing online users. We should definitely look into incentives in the future where we can get more creative and encourage more customers to get online. Competitions could work well online.

Online-only offers is not what LWC want to do as this punishes our loyal customers who don’t want to shop online. We understand that there will always be a minority of customers who will never want to shop online, and that’s ok. Our aim is to make the online experience so fantastic that everyone wants to use it. Our teams working together will be able to make that happen.