Driving E-Commerce Adoption with Sales Order Automation

Background Codale Electric Supply was founded in 1975 with five employees. In the 40 years since, it has become one of the fastest growing electrical distributors in America with over 300 employees spread out across 15 branches. In 2012, Codale joined the Sonepar USA group, allowing them to gain an even stronger presence in the market it serves while staying true to its customers and suppliers. The company prides itself on the trust it maintains with its customer base. With annual revenue that exceeds $300 million, Codale turned to Conexiom for Sales Order Automation to drive e-commerce adoption and free up time for CSRs to build relationships with their customers. Challenges E-Commerce Adoption The e-commerce platform used by Codale was originally intended to drive revenue by making ordering easier for their customers. In reality, the platform required more work from customers. First, they would have to create their own Purchase Order (PO) in their internal system as part of their company’s requisition process. Then, using the e-commerce platform they have to select the parts they want and ensure the pricing matches their system before ordering. What was once a 2-3 minute process by phone or email had turned into 10 minutes using a platform designed to make the ordering process easier. As a result, usage of the platform was low. Time Consuming Data Entry “With the sheer number of POs coming in, our Customer Service Reps were spending a significant amount of their work day entering them into our ERP system by hand,” explains Wyatt Snow, Codale’s e-commerce manager. Being a customer-focused organization, Codale wanted to free up its CSRs to spend more time focusing on its customers, rather than monotonous data entry. Key Results • Customer Service Representatives (CSR) have more time to build relationships • Made e-commerce experience easier for customers • Improved order cycle time and reduced data entry errors • Quick and easy implementation Entry Errors Even the most highly skilled CSR team can make data entry errors from time-to-time. With such a high volume of orders to enter in manually, errors were rare, but occurred. This could lead to delays in fulfillment or even incorrect orders, both of which can affect customer satisfaction. Codale required a solution that would streamline the order management process for their CSRs so they could continue to meet their customers’ high service expectations. By automating the e-commerce and email order channels, they could provide both their customers and CSRs with significant time savings and improve revenue. The Solution Conexiom was recommended to Codale by their partner Sonepar USA. “The e-commerce manager at Sonepar spoke highly of Conexiom as a means to solve our challenges with adoption. And a recommendation from our partner comes with a lot of weight,” noted Wyatt. Conexiom’s Customer Success team worked closely with the Codale team on how to generate buy in from their CSR team and loyal customer base. Driving E-Commerce Adoption with Sales Order Automation Codale Electric Supply - a division of Sonepar USA  866-860-3388  [email protected] Benefits Easier E-commerce “Our primary objective of this project was to make it easier for our clients to order from us online,” Wyatt explains. “With Conexiom, they simply email in the POs they were generating as part of their process and those POs are automatically forwarded to our e-commerce platform.” More Efficient Customer Service Department After setting up their first batch of high-volume trading partners for automation, the day-to-day workload for Codale’s CSR team decreased. This allowed time to focus their attention on more revenue generating activities such as relationship building and upselling. Easy Implementation “Conexiom was VERY easy to integrate. All we had to do was select some of our highest-volume customers and their Customer Success team did the heavy lifting. The training helped us become self-sufficient with the solution quickly,” explained Wyatt. “Our sales team was really excited to cut back on the amount of data entry. Even our customers bought into the solution quickly – they have enjoyed the shorter cycle time that has resulted from automation.” The Future Codale is excited about feature updates currently on the Conexiom roadmap and has already identified a few that will further increase its efficiencies. “After getting our highest-impact customers up and running, we’re excited to get more customers automated so we can continue to make the best use of our CSRs’ time,” Wyatt summarized. “Conexiom is going to be an integral part of our e-commerce strategy going forward.” About Conexiom Conexiom® allows manufacturers and distributors to focus on serving customers and managing supplier relationships instead of entering data. The patent-pending Conexiom solution was created by ecmarket, a cloud solutions developer. Conexiom revolutionizes critical sales and accounting business practices by automating manual entry with 100% accuracy. Conexiom effortlessly converts emailed and printed customer purchase orders and supplier invoices into automated sales orders and invoices, enabling companies to focus on driving growth. Conexiom helps organizations across the globe maintain a competitive edge. For more information visit conexiom.com “Our sales team was really excited to cut back on the amount of data entry. Even our customers bought into the solution quickly – they have enjoyed the shorter cycle time that has resulted from automation.” Wyatt Snow, E-Commerce Solutions Manager, Codale Electric Supply