Case Studies
The Sofa & Chair Company
The choice to deploy the pay-as-you-go address lookup service PostCoder Web SOAP from PostCoder.com has given The Sofa & Chair Company improved customer service and online experience. The furniture specialist has improved its website usability with the online address lookup software to allow customers and sales staff alike to instantly calculate delivery charges according to their location.
The Sofa & Chair Company is a leading upholstery specialist, based in West London. It has been specialising in the design and manufacture of high quality upholstery and custom-made seating solutions for 15 years.
Impractical service
The PostCoder.com solution replaces a time-consuming and inconvenient process where the customer would have to call the sales team for a delivery quote, forcing the customer to leave the website and potentially not complete the order. If delivery was requested to within the M25 then there was no charge, however if outside the M25 area there was an £80 fixed delivery charge. The company realised that this was not a fair or practical solution as they were charging customers the same delivery costs whether they were based just outside the M25 or the furthest reaches of the British Isles.
Nicole Jones, Sales Manager at The Sofa & Chair Company comments, "We appreciated that this was not an ideal solution for the business or our customers so we decided to change the practice and calculate the price according to the delivery distance. However, this was initially done on a manual basis where customers had to telephone the office for price enquiries rather than complete their orders online – clearly an inconvenient approach. Our employees were then looking up addresses on the internet and calculating the distance and therefore the cost themselves, meaning a disproportionate degree of the working day was taken up with processing delivery enquiries."
Accurate and rapid solution
Accessing over 1.7 million postcodes and 28 million Delivery Points and updated on a monthly basis, PostCoder Web SOAP provides fast, efficient and cost-effective address lookup abilities for website registration pages, order forms and similar.
Deployment of the PostCoder Web SOAP software means customers are now provided with a higher quality online experience and accurate pricing information. Jones continues, "With PostCoder Web SOAP, our online visitors – of which we have over 1,000 a day – can now simply enter the postcode and are instantly provided with the exact calculated costs for delivering to their address, without having to call into the office. Also, our sales staff are now no longer having to process such a high number of delivery enquiries each day – considering our daily traffic and the amount of time each delivery enquiry entailed, this is a substantial saving."
Jones concludes, "PostCoder Web SOAP has enabled us to provide our customers with an enhanced and professional facility. The service and support that we received when implementing the product was quick and easy and we are confident that Postcoder Web SOAP will continue to benefit our business in the future."
