How This Office Supply Company Saved 60 Hours a Week in Labor and Doubled Sales

“When I started, the first thing I did was do a deep dive of the website,” he says. “I studied every word, and I checked every link. I knew there was much more functionality that was not being used. To me, Emerald was like a good book. Inside, it’s a good read, but it needed a good cover. We had a new logo; we had our trucks wrapped. But we needed a good storefront. You can’t get business if you don’t have a good website. If you are not a household name, the first thing people do is look at your website. Ours had a long way to go.”

That’s when Jaret got in touch with DeAnne Field, ECI’s digital services advisor.

Jaret was full of ideas on how to improve the website and raring to begin the project immediately. To his surprise—and later appreciation—DeAnne suggested he slow the process down a bit.

“I wanted to change it all right now, right away,” Jaret says. “DeAnne was amazing. I sent her an email full of what I thought I wanted, and she got right back to me. But she suggested I spend the weekend thinking about it, and we’d talk next week. She said we needed a foundation. We needed to consider what was possible and best. She was right.”

Following DeAnne’s advice, he did more research.

He also wanted a site that would help Emerald make money. “The more you keep customers on the site finding what they need, the better it is. If they can’t find what they are looking for easily, you lose some sales with every order. When people came to our old site, it was like looking for a needle in the haystack. We were losing sales.”

With DeAnne’s help, Jaret zeroed in on what he was looking for and working with ECIs digital services team, they got started.

“The first thing we did was to create five landing pages and a much more appealing home page,” he says. “I wanted something that when I brought customers to the site, it would not be painful for them to try to find what they wanted.”

While Emerald had used ECI’s DDMS software, the company upgraded to DDMSPLUS. “Our furniture director liked the enhanced capabilities of DDMS Plus,” Jaret says. “It gave us more graphical options than before, and now every part of the operation uses the DDMS Plus graphical interface.”

Jaret also likes ECI’s internal approach. “The digital services team directs the traffic to the other ECI areas, like ecommerce and other technical expertise areas,” he says. “Everyone works together, but we can deal with the front and still get the support behind it we need.”

Jaret admits that not everything about revamping the website was smooth sailing but is quick to confess that some of the bumps were of his own desire to continuously improve the site. “A lot of the hiccups we have run into have been my own doing,” he says with a laugh. “For instance, I recently submitted new fonts and images, and DeAnne did exactly as I asked. I realized the fonts were not consistent, and by the next day, DeAnne had some mockups, and we were workshopping what we might want. We’ve used other vendors, and they can take too long to get back to you. With DeAnne’s kind of responsiveness, everything else will work itself out. It’s a great partnership.”

Jaret estimates Emerald’s redesigned website created by ECI’s digital services team “has already saved the equivalent of one and a half employees—60 hours a week—in labor. We’ve always trained customers to go through us, some by email, some by phone,” he says. “Before, our team would forward orders to customer service. Now, all our sales reps can go online and place orders on the site, removing all the time it would take to transfer the orders to the CS department. We can also see what stock we have of each item and suggest substitutions if we are out of something without having to get back to them. It’s all on the screen. It saves all of us time. Customers can also order direct online. The phone is ringing less, but that’s a good thing. In today’s ecommerce world, when the phone rings, it usually means there is an issue. With the volume of business we are doing, when the phones aren’t ringing, it means they are going on the website and ordering because it is easier than calling and saying, ‘On page 17 are yellow folders.’ Now they can go on the site themselves and go to Favorites and find and purchase their yellow folders.”

While saving time is saving money, the new ECI site has also boosted sales. “Last year, we doubled our sales,” Jaret says. “This year, it looks like we may double our sales again. I attribute a lot of that to the website.”

As a business, sales are also important to ECI. Yet Jaret believes customer satisfaction reigns supreme with the ECI design services team, even if it reduces profit margins in the short term. “We purchased five landing pages,” he says, providing an example. “Then we wanted to do office interiors way better. But rather than create a dedicated website, ECI helped us find a way we’ll be able to combine two of the web pages. So, we still only have to pay for five but can concentrate on our next big push—furniture. Our director of furniture sales can soon feel confident directing customers to our site.”