Van Marcke: improving customer experience with a B2B portal
When expanding and upgrading its e-commerce solution, bathroom specialist Van Marcke put its professional customer experience first. So together with a brand-new webshop, the company also implemented a B2B portal. The result? Happy customers, strong business insights and increased efficiency. Win-win-win!
Rethinking e-commerce
This
isn’t Van Marcke’s first e-commerce rodeo. In fact, the bathroom experts were
the first Belgian company to open a B2B webshop – over 20 years ago! Stijn
Hoegaerts, CIO at Van Marcke: “For 10 years, we were the only B2B webshop
around. Now however, competition is growing, and parts of our webshop had
become outdated. Customers have also become more demanding: we needed a
solution that was set up for next- or even same-day delivery. So it was time
for a grand overhaul. E-commerce accounts for 20% of our group revenue, so it’s
important we don’t fall behind. Of course, as pioneers, it’s a point of pride
too!”
Facing the challenge
Building
and implementing a B2B portal is no small feat. “The portal had to tick a lot
of boxes,” Stijn confirms. “It has to be easy to use, even without training. It
needs to empower customers, allowing them to find what they’re looking for and
take action themselves. And it should be personalized: we want our customers
to feel taken care of.”
In the end, the team at Van Marcke is very pleased with the result – even though the road to get there was challenging at times. Stijn: “For example: we had a lot of overlapping email addresses – over 10.000. Eliminating those from our data and getting the right email addresses, was an unforeseen obstacle. A word of advice: always make sure your data is up to standard, before you get too deep into the project.”
“Still, all those issues get solved when you’re working side by side with the right partner. We really appreciated the collaboration with Flexso on this project: our own IT team and the Flexso consultants worked in true co-creation. Sometimes this meant things took a bit longer, but we won that time back after go live: the in-house team knew the project inside-out, which meant we could provide better support.”
Because our in-house team worked in co-creation with the Flexso consultants on the entire project, we were well-equipped to offer support after the go-live.
The goal of the B2B portal is to make the customer’s life easier: looking for new products, placing new orders or following up on existing ones, they can do it all at the click of a button. Registration is made easy thanks to the Van Marcke registration assistant, which is built with the single sign-on module. A far cry better than the previous registration system, for which you had to fill in a form, submit it, get it verified, wait for your loyalty card through post, get a code, go online again… The whole process took a week! Whereas now, customers can register in 5 minutes, tops.
“Once
logged in, the B2B customers get a completely personalized launchpad with
large buttons that guide them where they want to go”, Stijn explains. “Depending
on the customer, that can be either the legacy webshop or the new webshop, for
example. New customers are directly guided to the new webshop, of course, but
we’re taking over our existing customers in waves – this way, we can also
implement their feedback more easily.”
