Retail Observer

RETAILOBSERVER.COM FEBRUARY 2022 52 T he AVB/BrandSource buying organization added a formidable tool to its digital arsenal last fall when it launched the HUB to its member dealers. A robust customer relationship management (CRM) tool, HUB organizes customers, their engagement within the showroom, and provides dealers with powerful sales tools to enhance the in-store experience. When a BrandSource appliance, home furnishings or CE dealer logs in to the HUB, they will see a dashboard that shows sales and traffic by the type of interaction customers have had with their store, and they can see how this has changed over periods of time to evaluate growth or areas of opportunity. When a customer visits a member's store, the HUB has everything needed to capture their profile. Whether they need to create a new database, or if the HUB has imported previous customers from the POS, a salesperson can update contact information, add notes, create relevant tags, and even assign the customer to another team member. Once in the customer record, here's where the real power of the HUB comes into play. Because the HUB is connected to AVB's LINQ merchandising catalog and proprietary ALTA e-commerce site, it can leverage information from both tools to organize products and help members make the sale. If a customer is "just looking," a salesperson can create a project board to collect and store all of the products they are browsing in person. This tool searches the LINQ catalog in real time, so any product details are relevant and up to date. Storing these grouped products in the customer record means they can be accessed in their history at any time, by any member of the team. No losing pertinent details if a team member is away! When the customer decides they are ready to purchase, one click will create a quote with all the products from their Project Board. From there, the sales team can discount products by line item, or create a discount for the entire quote. Any active coupons available on the ALTA website will also be available in the quote tool. Should a dealer wish to restrict either of these functions, they can do so in the HUB settings and user permissions. When a quote is created in the HUB, it sends the customer a link to purchase securely via the same checkout tool that the ALTA website uses, which includes all of the existing payment options. Additionally, any product specifications that are stored in LINQ will be sent in the customer quote, which means in addition to not requiring quotes to be printed, these PDFs can also be delivered digitally! Quotes can also be copied with one click, for those customers making the same purchases time and time again. Another great feature tying the AVB tools together is the HUB cart. If a customer is logged into an ALTA site from the comforts of their home, browsing and researching products, and then adds these items to their cart, they can be pulled up in their customer record in HUB. Again, one click converts this cart to a quote that can be emailed to the customer for secure checkout. As the product owner for HUB, it was a great pleasure to demonstrate its functionality at the BrandSource Convention in Nashville and to hear the excitement for what we were rolling out. But we are just getting started! Up next for 2022, we are implementing some big features: We are streamlining email and text interactions, so these conversations can be initiated and stored in HUB; we are enhancing the product search with better categorization; and are looking to enhance barcode scanning for faster product lookup on tablets. Stay tuned! Kate Morris is a product owner, engineering and technology, for AVB/BrandSource, the nation's leading merchandising and marketing co-op for independent appliance, home furnishings and consumer tech dealers. Kate Morris Digital Services RO WHAT'S ALL THE HUBBUB ABOUT THE AVB HUB? BrandSource's CRM tool on steroids is about to get even better

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