Episode 33: Customer Service Tips for Holiday Company Stores
Recap
Every year when the holiday season rolls around distributors everywhere celebrate and cringe all at once. Why? Simple, the holidays bring in significant sales but with that comes lots of last-minute orders and an extra heavy workload. One of the ways you can buy yourself some extra time during the busy holiday season is by using your Company Store as an extension of your customer service team.
When you set up your Company Store, you have the option to add additional pages like an FAQ or Contact Us page. To help save you time all year round, be sure to take advantage of these pages. Try to put yourself in your shoppers’ shoes. If you were shopping in the Company Store and were having issues placing an order, who would you call and how would you find out how to reach them? Including your contact information as well as answers to the questions you frequently hear like how to place an order, check an account balance, and what to do with returns will help free up your phone lines. Plus, customers will be happy they have the information they were looking for right in front of them.
Giving shoppers the ability to create their own account is another big time saver and customer service tool. When a shopper creates an account, it gives them access to view the status of current orders, check their account balance, load addresses, and check what items they’ve ordered in the past as well as other order details like size and color.
Interested in learning even more about how you can use your Company Store as an extension of your customer service? Be sure to read our blog, Customer Service Tips for Holiday Company Stores.
Episode 34: Why Technology Changes
Recap
Do you ever feel like technology is changing at the speed of light? If you answered yes, you’re not alone. There’s a reason we all feel that way, and that’s because technology is evolving at an ever-increasing rate. The reasons behind the rapid change are plentiful, but one of the big ones is that technological changes help keep our society moving forward. So you better believe that each of those developments or technological breakthroughs were created with a specific purpose in mind.
For example, BrightStores founder had a successful distributorship back in 1999 but felt that there had to be a better way for clients to place an order besides the traditional phone call or fax. So what did he do? He turned his idea into a reality, and Co-Store (our original Company Store platform) was born. This process of identifying something that could be improved upon is how most technology comes about and the reason behind the majority of our updates, new features, and platforms. When we receive feedback from our team and the distributors who use our software our development team tries to see how they can take that feedback and either find a solution, improve upon it, and put that idea into action (that is after thorough testing).
Thanks to the feedback our distributors provided us this past year. We took it to heart, and our development team worked hard to make improvements to our all of our platforms. So many that it may have been hard to keep track of them all. Lucky for you, we went through each of our major updates in our latest webinar. Watch to learn all about these new features and use them to improve your stores and impress even your most tech-savvy clientele.
Episode 35: Happy Thanksgiving From BrightStores!
No Recap – Happy Holidays!
Episode 36: Webinar Key Takeaway – 2018 New Feature Roundup!
Recap
Our team made quite a few updates to our existing platforms in 2018, developing new features like a storefront re-order button, mass product upload and edit, and tons more. While you may have noticed some of these changes, other updates weren’t as noticeable. To make things easy, we’re sharing our top three updates/changes you need to know.
1) Added Flexibility & Functionality to Products
The promotional products industry is all about the products of course! So this year one of the things we focused on was adding even more flexibility and functionality to how you can add products and what type of products you can add to your client’s Company Store. Our team also developed features to improve the process and speed of uploading, editing, and internally identifying products.
2) Virtual Samples & Variable Data
We also expanded and added on to our Company Stores print and product customization capabilities. Now clients can personalize even more product areas, preview side-by-side images, and give online proof approval all from the storefront. Variable Data and virtualization technology allows shoppers to customize business cards, corporate stationery, and so much more. These features aren’t just for your client. They also allow you to create virtual samples and print-ready files.
3) Enhanced User Checkout Experience
An intuitive and quick checkout experience can help prevent shoppers from abandoning their cart, which is why we are continually making enhancements to the user checkout experience in our stores. A few of the upgrades made this year included adding an in-hands date and re-order button.
There’s a plethora of other updates and new features that came out in 2018. If you are interested in hearing about all of our updates and how they can enhance your client’s store, watch the webinar recording here.