Orgill Case Study | 9 Adding to the challenges of limited flexibility with the website and the difficulty maintaining product data internally, McGuckin was also severely limited in its ability to integrate any of its customer loyalty program features into the online environment. With its extremely loyal customer base, the McGuckin team felt hemmed in by the functionality of its legacy loyalty program. “There’s really no other way to put it, but our existing loyalty program was just not working out the way we needed it to,” Harrison says. “The data was owned by another vendor, and we couldn’t access data when we wanted to or needed to. This meant we couldn’t do everything we wanted. Prior to using the last vendor’s loyalty program, we had maintained our own loyalty program, and while it was more time-consuming, our customers liked it better. We decided we wanted to go back to something that met our needs—not our vendor’s needs.” Harrison and the rest of the McGuckin team had a clear understanding of the challenges they were facing. Their biggest concern was finding a solution that would meet their needs and be affordable and scalable as they moved forward. “We wanted to give our customers a tool to be able to shop us and bring them into the store,” Harrison says. “Ultimately, any business’s goal is to increase sales through technology, and that’s where we were as well. Any advantage we could give ourselves to bring customers into the door or retain that customer, that was our ultimate goal.” McGuckin wanted: • A more flexible and easily customizable customer-facing website that was reflective of their brand. • The ability to offer customers more products online with richer, more complete product information and data. • An online assortment that more accurately reflected product availability. • A product data management solution to integrate their Epicor Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)/Point of Sale (POS) system. • A more flexible and robust loyalty program to give customers a seamless experience in-store or online. An Orgill distribution partner since 2006, the McGuckin team began exploring how Orgill and its vendor partners could solve its eCommerce and loyalty-program needs. “We had a website for years and it just wasn’t clicking really well for us,” Harrison says. “Both on the content side of things, as far as inventory, and on the internal integration side of things, as far as talking with our Epicor Eagle POS system.” McGuckin has been an Ace Hardware Cooperative member for years, and used a website and eCommerce solution provided through Epicor. This legacy system made it very complicated to do any website customization, Harrison said. Additionally, McGuckin was using an internal solution for data integration and management, meaning McGuckin could only offer a fraction of their assortment online. “Maintaining this vast number of SKUs was just a never-ending project,” Harrison says. “We would get through a few thousand items only to realize that there were changes within those items, and we would have to go back and start over again. It was really limiting for us and a tax on our resources. We were asking people to do this, but it wasn’t really anyone’s job to maintain it.” Finding the Right Fit Committed to Customer Loyalty
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