A wholesale industrial and construction products buying and marketing group (with a network of 650 suppliers and 570+ distributors) needed to help its members build more business opportunities.
A key issue lay with their partner portal. It was experiencing scalability and performance issues. It could not support the company’s strategic growth plans, which focused on boosting core member growth (in new markets and geographies).
To meet growth goals, the group needed to transform its partner portal into an easy-to-use, multi-lingual digital platform so distributors and suppliers could connect and collaborate. The more members could collaborate, the more business opportunities presented themselves.
Business Reasons
The group needed to recruit more members, but there is a lot competition in attracting best-in-class suppliers and growth-oriented distributors. It is not enough to simply sign them up. To hit their growth targets, the company had to recruit them and earn their loyalty. Loyalty, however, can be difficult to secure.
Providing a differentiated, best-in-class portal was crucial. Members needed to use and love the group’s portal. To boost utilization rates, it needed to provide the tools that the members needed and an engaging user experience.
In many cases, the decision to engage does comes down to a great user experience. Forrester Research found that most extranet portals offer an overall poor user experience, due to inefficient task flows, inadequate content, indecipherable text and ineffective use of space and layouts. Therefore, it was important for the group to differentiate its new portal from the competitors’ by creating an engaging digital experience.
Keste Solution
Keste built a scalable, mobile-ready, multi-lingual extranet portal. Today, the site is interactive and actionable, strengthening the collaboration between distributors and suppliers. Both the look and feel and the search experience were enhanced, and easy-to-use, graphical reporting tools were added to provide members with timely, easy-to-access information to drive growth.
Results
The new best-in-class portal supports the sales/marketing group’s business growth initiatives. Thanks to new language support and a scalable infrastructure, the group has expanded operations into South America. Site traffic has increased 12% since launch, and there has been a 40% increase in site performance.
The portal is now an interactive, actionable digital platform that provides valuable, timely and accurate information to help distributors make better purchase decisions. In fact, users no longer have to drill down several layers and click around the website to find the information. By streamlining the search for information, the portal provides the flexibility that distributors and suppliers need to modify program buying behaviors and maximize margins.
Keste built this digital platform to help the group’s members grow and manage their business, and we can do the same for you. To learn more about our portals and digital experience platform solutions, click here.
