This article is brought to you by Retail Technology Review: The Sofa & Chair Company improves customer service and online experience with PostCoder.com.
Upholstery specialist The Sofa & Chair Company has successfully implemented PostCoder Web SOAP the pay-as-you-go address lookup service from PostCoder.com to enable customers and sales staff alike to instantly calculate delivery charges according to their location. The service replaces a time-consuming and inconvenient process where the customer would have to call the sales team for a delivery quote, forcing the customer to leave the website and potentially not complete the order.
Based in West London, The Sofa and Chair Company has been specialising in the design and manufacture of high quality upholstery and custom-made seating solutions for 15 years. Previously, if customers were requesting delivery within the M25 then there was no charge, however if outside the M25 area there was an 80 fixed delivery charge. The company realised that this was not a fair or practical solution as they were charging customers the same delivery costs whether they were based just outside the M25 or the furthest reaches of the British Isles.
Nicole Jones, Sales Manager comments, "We appreciated that this was not an ideal solution for the business or our customers so we decided to change the practice and calculate the price according to the delivery distance. However, this was initially done on a manual basis where customers had to telephone the office for price enquiries rather than complete their orders online clearly an inconvenient approach. Our employees were then looking up addresses on the internet and calculating the distance and therefore the cost themselves, meaning a disproportionate degree of the working day was taken up with processing delivery enquiries."
Jones continues, "With PostCoder Web SOAP, our online visitors of which we have over 1,000 a day can now simply enter the postcode and are instantly provided with the exact calculated costs for delivering to their address, without having to call into the office. This means they are provided with a higher quality online experience and accurate pricing information. Also, our sales staff are now no longer having to process such a high number of delivery enquiries each day considering our daily traffic and the amount of time each delivery enquiry entailed, this is a substantial saving."
Accessing over 1.7 million postcodes and 28 million Delivery Points and updated on a monthly basis, PostCoder Web SOAP provides fast, efficient and cost-effective address lookup abilities for website registration pages, order forms and similar.
Jones concludes, "PostCoder Web SOAP has enabled us to provide our customers with an enhanced and professional facility. The service and support that we received when implementing the product was quick and easy and we are confident that Postcoder Web SOAP will continue to benefit our business in the future."
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