Glassolutions m-commerce website
Glassolutions chose SQLI to put in place a mobile m-commerce application for its building professionnal customers. The challenge is to provide an intuitive tool accessible at all times, offering order management in just a few clicks.
Context
Saint-Gobain Glassolutions processes and commercialises a wide range of glass solutions for the Building industry. The Saint-Gobain network is present on 200 sites spread over 16 countries in Europe.
As part of its European e-commerce development, the Saint-Gobain company specialised in transforming and distributing glass solutions for buildings, wanted to set up a mobile solution for its professional customers (including mirror and window installers, and plumbers).
The brand wanted to take on this mobility challenge as its customers working on sites required an instant response to their request.
Challenges
Address the needs of building professionals
Saint-Gobain Glassolutions’ customers are building professionals who work on site.Due to their working environment and lead times, it is essential for them to be able to order instantly and quickly the materials needed for their work.
Saint-Gobain Glassolutions wanted to offer them a solution to cost and quote in just a few clicks, via a mobile application, going hand in hand with its e-commerce site.
It was also important for them to be able to use the application in their mother tongue (the application is used in 6 countries), on iOS or Android.
Practicality and efficiency at the heart of the development
Saint-Gobain Glassolutions chose SQLI to assist it with this project, due to the complementarity of its skills, not only technological , but also in terms of UX design.
To benefit from a cross-platform native mobile application, the Xamarin development framework proved the ideal solution. Plus, a single back-office allows access to both the e-commerce site and the mobile application.=
The challenge of this project is to be able to communicate with Saint-Gobain’s entire Information System (Salesforce for CRM, Pros Smart CPQ to generate offers and quotes and Microsoft Azure for hosting) via a set of standard APIs.
At the launch of the application, positive feedback has flooded in: users appreciate the time they save with the app. A few features are proving a particular hit :
- The Touch ID system, to log in instantly
- The speed of the solution: Just 10 clicks to create a quote
- The possibility of duplicating an order and memorising a configuration
The solution also enable its users to discover products that they couldn’t see in the catalogue.
In the future, it will be possible to easily integrate other features, based on changing customer behaviour. The application is currently available in 6 countries and will be expanded to all of Europe this year.
On the back of this success, Saint-Gobain Glassolutions is already making the most of this project to develop new features on its e-commerce website.
Benefits
Initial customer feedback gathered by Saint-Gobain Glass Solutions is positive: in particular, they appreciate the speed, the user experience and the configuration steps.
In the future, other features can be easily integrated in accordance with how Glassolutions’ customer usages evolve. The application is currently available in 6 countries and will be expanded to all of Europe this year. Thanks to this success, Glassolutionsis already capitalising on this achievement to develop new features on its e-commerce website.
"Our goal is to double the number of active customers on our application. Today, we have 1,200 users on the e-commerce platform. We expect as many users, if not more, with this new solution. Implementing it was essential to offer a smoother, better quality buying experience, in line with new mobile consumption. We count on achieving a better conversion rate, offering our complete systems and accessories more systematically, and, ultimately improving customer satisfaction.
SQLI understood our needs perfectly and offered us the highest quality support in the technical as well as functional aspects, in spite of a very tight schedule. The teams were flexible and tenacious in finding a solution to the technical problems encountered."
