Uses OrderWriter® to Cut Costs and Improve Customer Service |
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Overview
Marshall Salon Services is a full service distributor of hair care, skin and nail products selling to over 7,000 salons through 44 direct sales representatives. For over 70 years they have helped independent salon owners and stylists to be as profitable and successful as they can be. Marshall’s sells more than 9,000 products including the well known Redkin, Rusk, Nioxin, Keune, Graham as well as many other quality product lines. The company serves Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota and North Dakota and considers itself as a sales, marketing, education and distribution company.
Challenge
Marshall’s evolution of taking customer orders started with the sales representative selling and delivering out of the truck, to hand carrying orders to the main office, then faxing orders to the main office, and then using a Telzon unit with a scanner sending orders in. Each and every stage in the evolution offered a short term gain but did not provide the complete solution Marshall’s was seeking. “We continued to have information flows and manual steps to process orders that were fragmented,” said Jim Marshall, President. “For example, the sales representatives still did not have current knowledge on how much money each customer owed the company as well as what products were in the warehouse. This put the company at a huge disadvantage.”
Additionally, to keep pace with the ever-demanding marketplace, the company continued to add product lines. “Having the right mix of products plays a critical role being able to meet the unique needs of our customer’s,” explains Marshall. “Providing weekly updates to the sales force were not enough to keep sales representatives current on the company’s continuously changing products and offerings.”
A few years ago, executives within the company decided they needed to improve how sales representatives were taking orders and provide them with current information. In spite of the changes the company made over the years, there were still too many manual, inflexible and unresponsive things that were being done, which interfered with running the business better. “It was a frustrating and expensive process, which could not support Marshall’s planned growth,” said Marshall.
Solution
To solve their mission-critical needs, Marshall Salon Services turned to Access International and implemented the OrderWriter software solution for remote order entry.
“Of particular interest to Marshall’s regarding OrderWriter was its robust functionality along with its built-in flexibility. This allowed us to meet the needs of many different types of customers with a single software solution. Another key benefit was the low cost of ownership with OrderWriter,” states Marshall.
The OrderWriter software solution enables the sales representatives to access complete customer information, helping them to have a clear understanding about the customer’s buying history, needs, and current status. The sales representative can easily see the entire customer profile. Having the timely information at their fingertips helps the sales representative stay ahead of the competition and maximizes their relationship with each customer.
“Our sales representatives have moved from order takers to business partners with each of their customers,” comments Marshall. “We now have an order entry system that permits us to deliver consistent high quality customer service. In fact, many of our customers have commented how impressed they are Marshall’s takes their order using a laptop computer while the competition continues to look at catalogs or sheets of paper.”
OrderWriter permits the sales representatives to successfully handle the more than 80 special promotions every week with ease. The special order guides feature in OrderWriter helps the sales representative remember each promotion and enter the order very quickly.
“Since implementing OrderWriter, Marshall’s has increased the number of customer orders from 185 to over 500 per day and raised the average dollar value of an order by 124%. More importantly, order entry error rates have been reduced significantly and the average collection days decreased from 36 days to 25 ½ days. OrderWriter makes it easy to take orders in a OrderWriter makes it easy to take orders in a cost effective way. An additional benefit we now enjoy is OrderWriter enables us to continue our expansion,” says Marshall.
