The Brief
A large furniture retailer was looking for a way to keep salespeople better engaged with customers throughout the sales process. While building a customer’s order, the salesperson would have to step away to enter items into a terminal. This process not only left customers standing alone but was performed on decades-old machine and applications with little concern for intuitive and efficient order composition and processing.
The Challenge
This break in engagement left customers feeling disengaged and ultimately neglected which led to fewer closed sales. Furthermore, working on these outdated systems and applications meant new employees went through extensive, company-sponsored training. The client clearly needed to solve two problems – modernization of their current order system, and keeping salespeople engaged with customers.
The Solution
The Apexon team studied the concerns and needs of the client and how salespeople engaged with their customers. This research led Apexon to propose a mobile point of sale (POS) progressive web application (PWA) which salespeople could easily access and process orders from personal devices or tablets while within the store premises.
As the client had significant undocumented business logic stored in the mainframe procedures used to drive their existing application, they were unable to easily modify application flow or provide modern interactivity. Instead, the Apexon team opted to develop a custom middleware layer capable of caching bits of both the stored procedures and the data from the new application, allowing it to expose entirely new flows and functionality without modification to mainframe procedures.
The Results
The resulting solution brought about a new level of comfort in the sales process. Salespeople could now sit down on the very couch they’re about to sell and process the order. The client no longer faced the burden of providing costly training to new employees, allowing them to quickly begin their roles.
As many brick-and-mortar retailers are losing out to online solutions, we’ve found that it’s incredibly important to provide pleasant experiences for those customers entering the store, and a well-thought-out sales process is a major factor in customer satisfaction and the subsequent conversion funnel.
Partnership Platforms/software
