KUSMI TEA discover new sources of business created with Visiativ BtoB e-Commerce

French specialist for sweet delicatessen, Orientis is the owing company of famous tea brand Kusmi Tea. Bruno Counterweight, its Director of Information Systems, discuss about what have been the outcomes of deploying Visiativ BtoB e-Commerce solutions for sales teams and customers.

What were your needs, difficulties you faced, before starting Kusmi Tea digital transformation?

Kusmi Tea is distributed in its 85 own shops, and about 20 franchise shops also, and benefits from a network of 3,000 resellers. In order to drive and develop network sales, we needed a real BtoB e-commerce solution dedicated to our BtoB customers, meaning our network of resellers.

Indeed, until then we worked with an e-commerce tool developed internally to animate the network, but it was targeted first for BtoC uses. This tool no longer met our needs and was not adapted to the journey of a BtoB customer.

Our ambition was to select a platform adapted to businesses and needs of our customers, with enhanced functionalities, synchronization of data flows and the simplest and most accurate price listings than possible. We therefore went around the market, and contacted Visiativ teams with whom we had worked previously. We chose Visiativ BtoB e-Commerce Consumer Goods platform, because it is interconnected with our Cegid ERP.

How did you manage the deployment of the solution?

We organized a meeting with the Visiativ and Cegid teams, in order to frame the project and ensure good technical link between ERP and Visiativ BtoB e-Commerce BtoB. Our goal was to have a ready-to-use solution quickly, without specific development and hosted in SaaS. We opted for a standard platform, which we customized (definition of shelves and thumbnails).

Above all, we didn’t want to mobilize our marketing and merchandising teams to create a front office. The standardization and ergonomics of the platform enabled deployment in 6 months.

How does the platform contribute to network animation and sales increase?

Our ERP manages prices and customer data, while item data are synchronized via our PIM. It enables our BtoB customers to restock but also to prepare their specific orders with a multi-basket mode. On the other hand, ERP does not manage promotions. We needed a solution to drive sales and promotional operations that had to be adapted to customer segmentation.

Today, our distributors perceive the Visiativ BtoB e-Commerce Consumer Goods solution as a full e-commerce website. They navigate to discover our products, or to easily proceed their order in “quick basket” mode. We defined a real buyer’s journey with promotions and personalized pages, discovery of side products for upsell and retain them even longer. For our sales teams in charge of the reseller network, the BtoB site is a real sales support tool.

How did your sales representatives react to this new platform?

When new tool, there is new reflexes to adopt… Our desire was to set up a solution managed and animated by our sales team. Everyone was very positive and the adoption very fast. Of course, Visiativ BtoB e-Commerce Consumer Goods brings real added value, it enables you to sell better and more, and it is a source of new business opportunities. Salespeople therefore quickly understood the interest of animating this solution, which is moreover intuitive and ergonomic.

And on the side of BtoB customers?

The platform has been acclaimed by our resellers. It was quickly adopted thanks to its fluid navigation, close to basic e-commerce site. We set our network a customer journey adapted to the needs of BtoB: shopping list, shopping cart, synchronization of stocks in real time thanks to the connection to the ERP. Today, we see that 80% of distributors use BtoB to place their orders, compared to 60% in the past.

What are your “digital” projects, in the short or medium term?

We will continue to develop BtoB e-commerce site. For example, we plan to integrate a “Notify me” button, to be notified when a reference is back on stocks, or even a display of prices including tax. The advantage is that this type of evolution is included in our subscription. And our IT team is not monopolized for these evolutions requested by businesses. We are also constantly thinking about the digitization of our processes, dematerialization of our documents, or even thinking about setting up a service portal dedicated to our employees.