Gaults Hospitality was already a well-established, large-volume distributor of food and health care wholesale products when they chose VKI to bring their small, static website into the 21st century.
What they were looking for was an online system to match their complex in-house processing, so that their e-commerce would work in conjunction with their existing offline system as one dependable and highly functioning unit.
They were concerned about finding a solution for their expensive distribution costs, which involved the mass production of large mail-order catalogues, and saving time and money on customer service representatives who accept orders. Meeting these goals would require the creation of an alternate revenue stream for the company, as well as an alternate way to market their products and services.
Gaults Hospitality also had aspirations to improve their small, unproductive online presence into something that represented the size and success of their company, one that would express their importance and reputation appropriately for both new and existing customers.
Before we got started, we met with our clients to build our strategy plan. VKI stressed our position as a start to finish company, relaying that after the project was complete, we would continue to fully manage their marketing campaign. In doing so, we agreed to cover a complete range of development and marketing, as well as tech support on all of their Internet needs.
The specific services we provided Gaults Hospitality included consultations, specifications of what they needed, planning, program testing and debugging, ongoing maintenance, Internet marketing, as well as search engine optimization (SEO).
Although integrating the website to the offline system turned out to be a much bigger project then we originally estimated, we managed to keep the cost from increasing and still overcome those challenges. We created an online system that integrates with their offline one - every four hours, synchronizing their website with their offline system for product and customer information, so clients can quickly log in and make purchases.
We built an online catalogue creation tool (for PDF format catalogues), which allows Gaults sales people to log in anytime and create custom catalogues for their customers, to be emailed or printed off. And we implemented a banner management system, which adds, edits or deletes banners on the website and applies weights to control how often they show up. The system also keeps statistics on how often the banners are used and clicked.
One of the most innovative services that we were able to provide to Gaults Hospitality is called "Room-In-A-Box", a service which allows customers to custom order the contents of an entire hotel room together in one box, rather than order everything separately. Since this feature allows everything to go to the room easier and faster, hotels are able to save double if not more on this service, despite the initial extra cost.
What Gaults Hospitality ended up with was a site that fulfilled their initial goals and exceeded their expectations in savings and response. Not only do the online versions of their catalogues and order processing continue to save them more than the equivalent of their initial investment, but they were able to expand their market greatly into the US.
Within the first 6 months they had more new client applications than the last 3 years! And they still have a drawer full of applications that they're holding on to.
The time saved by their customer service representative team has been substantial as well. Their clients spend significantly less time on the phone explaining things because most of their needs can be satisfied on the new user-friendly webpage. With the system we developed, Gaults is able to use less service reps to serve more people.
And their web site and its processing systems are now more professional than any of their competitors in Canada.
To this day, VKI provides Gaults Hospitality with an ongoing marketing campaign to keep their site at the top of search engine rankings. We also continue to refine and improve their website according to the keywords, as well as administering ongoing maintenance and upgrading to improve their site as needed.
Moving their operations online has made Gaults Hospitality one of the largest distributors of wholesale hospitality products on Internet. The success they have been able to achieve through the programming and Internet market strategies provide an excellent example of how VKI services can deliver to any business.
