Services: Contact Center – Sales and Service
Industry: CPG

A Relationship from the Start

In 2001, a global snack food provider was in search of a more efficient method for delivering products to its smaller retail accounts. The increasing costs of direct store delivery were making it too expensive to service stores with smaller sales volumes.

The company collaborated with Dialog Direct to come up with a solution to reduce delivery costs, while still maintaining excellent customer service with their smaller retail accounts. Dialog Direct’s solution was to transition the current smaller retail accounts from direct store deliveries to shipping products via UPS from their multiple distribution center locations. Dialog Direct began taking orders over the phone, processing payments and sending orders via encrypted files to the nearest distribution center, which allows the manufacturer to ship their order via UPS to the desired retailer.

01 | Problem

After nearly 10 years of working with Dialog Direct, the snack food company identified a need to improve website functionality in order to better support and increase web orders while reducing operational costs. It was critical for the company to drive phone orders to the web in an effort to increase profitability. Greater use of the company’s website would lead to better customer service by offering customers the ability to track their shipments online, as well as being able to submit orders 24 hours a day, seven days a week. By driving more business to the web, the snack food company can reallocate part of its sales force to other parts of its business, such as using these employees to acquire more accounts and make additional calls to publicize new products and promotions.

02 | Solution

Dialog Direct provides profitable go-to-market programs to manufacturers that enable small business accounts to easily place orders for products over the phone, web or fax. Using its contact center resources, Dialog Direct helps manufacturers sell product more effectively and efficiently to markets that were previously unreachable. By partnering with the customer experience management company, businesses allow Dialog Direct’s highly skilled and trained contact center representatives to handle every stage in the sales process, from pre-sales to post-sales, greatly reducing the cost of servicing these accounts while increasing sales volume.

Company executives cited Dialog Direct’s creativeness, innovativeness and ability to take a new concept and integrate it into the snack food company’s business as a major part of their decision to once again enlist the Dialog Direct’s services.

The company selected Dialog Direct’s order taking program, which allows store owners to easily place orders via phone, web, electronic file or fax at no shipping cost to them. The company embraces every cross-sell or upsell opportunity by looking at existing customers’ past purchase history, and then recommending complementary products and services.

To ensure success, Dialog Direct organized and executed an awareness campaign, targeted to the client’s small format store accounts, which included talking to every customer about web order capabilities and discussing web ordering on all interactive voice response (IVR) – welcome calls, monthly email blasts and customer flyers.

03 | Results

After the first five months of the campaign, Dialog Direct helped the snack food company increase web orders by 26 percent (from 7 to 33 percent of overall orders). Currently, web orders account for 41 percent of the snack food company’s annual orders.

In addition, the snack food company reports significant improvements in customer satisfaction as a result of working with Dialog Direct. Because orders can easily be placed through the web, customers now have the option to place orders at any time, day or night, rather than during business hours only. Based on the initial results of the campaign, the snack food company intends to continue moving forward with the customer awareness program. In fact, the company has made plans to leverage newly available technology and social media, such as Facebook, to further reach customers in an effort to increase the use of web orders.