26 | Orgill Case Study RESULTS According to Harrison, some of the most tangible evidence of the success of their new strategic rollout comes with face-to-face customer interactions. “We have customers coming into the store holding their phone and showing our associate things they were looking at on our website and they will complete the purchase in store,” he says. “It is a great marriage of our online and in-store experience, which is exactly what we were hoping to achieve.” Harrison also points out that, while launching the entire program at the start of the pandemic crisis certainly created additional challenges, he feels the pain points were worth the flexibility the online shopping options gave McGuckin customers. “As far as our web sales go, during the pandemic there was really no way to compare apples to apples with the sales we were generating versus what we generated with our old site and system prior to COVID,” Harrison says. “You could almost take just the first month with our new site and the sales we generated through it and compare it to an entire year’s worth of previous sales. But I know we couldn’t have done business without the functionality the new site afforded us, and this was huge for our store, but it was also huge for our customers to be able to have that option.” Harrison says the McGuckin team continues to work with Orgill, Tyndale and Unilog in an ongoing way to maintain, improve and tweak its systems. Now, McGuckin is interested in using the raft of information and data they now have as a result of the changes they made. “The next big thing on our radar right now is digging into data and learning where we need to be,” Harrison says. “We want to start looking at things like what our customers are searching for and whether we have it or not—finding those gaps. But this gives us that kind of insight we didn’t have before. This is really just the beginning. It is going well now, but we want to continue to make things better.”
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