Exeed's website cranks up customer service

Exeed's new website makes it easier for IT resellers to find products, check pricing, and place and their track orders. This is creating better customer engagement and loyalty while decreasing the load on customer service staff.

Exeed IT distributors

Commercial: Application development, Web-enabled business

Exeed is a leading IT distributor providing thousands of resellers around New Zealand with products from companies including HP, Microsoft, Netgear, and most recently, Samsung. The company had an aging ASP-based e-commerce website that was complicated and slow for customers to use, difficult for the company to manage and support, and which was becoming increasingly unreliable. Because of its out-dated architecture, the website also lacked the flexibility and extensibility to support Exeed’s business model as it changed over time.

The solution

Exeed engaged Optimation to replace their existing site with a new standards-based secure e-commerce website that offered like-for-like functionality - including pricing, promotions, ordering, and order tracking - but which delivers a much enhanced user experience. For resellers, it is now far easier to find products, check pricing, place orders, and track theirs orders and invoices. Exeed expects that this will reduce the load on its 0800 number, because customers will be able to reliably and effectively conduct much more of their business by self-service over the web.

The flexibility inherent in the new site’s standards-based architecture means it gives Exeed a robust foundation for future business growth and development. For example, the site can be readily adapted to support additional product vendors and product ranges, and there are also new opportunities to generate additional revenue through enhanced capabilities for online advertising.

“The new website has had a direct impact on the volume of business we transact online by making it easier for our customers to find and order what they need,” says Justin Tye, Exeed’s Managing Director.

Key outcomes

• Better website reliability and performance
• Enhanced customer loyalty
• Increased business flexibility
• New revenue opportunities
• reduced load on the call centre
• Improved support

The Optimation difference

Exeed initially approached a shortlist of three IT specialists with its requirements. Optimation was selected because of its willingness to take on the challenges of working with legacy technologies and non-standards-based backend applications. Optimation, as a New Zealand-owned and operated company with a powerful customer service ethic, also had a business philosophy and approach that was well-aligned with Exeed. As the project went on, the working relationship Exeed developed with the Optimation team became another significant differentiator.

Solution overview

The site is built using Microsoft’s latest web technologies, including the Microsoft ASP.NET MVC2 Framework and the Managed Extensibility Framework in .NET 4.0, to deliver a robust, scalable e-commerce site. Key benefits of this approach include separation of the presentation layer and business logic from underlying data layers, and the ability to add in new functionality and components in future without having to re-build the application.