Guest Supply

The Challenge

Guest Supply, the leader in hospitality supplies, had a legacy digital commerce system that was adopted by 70 percent of their buyers, but it was missing key functionality. As a result, they needed a whole-systems upgrade to stay on top of this multi-billion-dollar market.

“Guest Supply was challenged to modernize our entire ecommerce business – moving from an antiquated home-grown system to a modern, scalable platform,” said David Stutler, Guest Supply Senior Director, Ecommerce & Technology. “Our ability to bring features to market was severely limited by the age of our systems and the underlying business complexity.”

Guest Supply recognized the value in making commerce and content investments, so they had a number of goals in mind for their enhanced ecommerce operation:

• Modern UX/UI: Create a modern, intuitive website design for conversion.
• Personalized Customer Experiences: Personalize user experiences from customer-specific order guides to tailored promotions.
• Actionable Data: Store, update, access, and provide real-time product data to buyers and internal teams.
• Improved Functionality for Complex Orders: Handle complex transactions, e.g. large product lists, multiple locations, and checkout flexibility.
• Power Business Intelligence: Integrate business intelligence for helping the Guest Supply sales and service teams.

Guest Supply opted to partner with Xngage thanks to our depth of B2B ecommerce experience and expertise.

The Xngage Solution

Ecommerce Strategy: Based on Guest Supply’s unique needs, Xngage and Guest Supply selected the Optimizely Configured Commerce platform for their ecommerce, PIM, and CMS needs.

Ecommerce Implementation: Beyond the standard ecommerce platform implementation, Xngage was able to offer a variety of features to improve the customer experience and streamline Guest Supply’s business processes. First, multi-lingual UX/UI design gives their site a clean, fresh, intuitive design. Real-time product availability gave their customers insight into Guest Supply’s inventory in local markets (as well as out-of-stock items) at the beginning of their online customer journey. Guest Supply’s site can handle complex, high-volume orders – hundreds of products with multiple users in a single complete order. It can also offer customer-specific catalogs, built on preferences and previous purchases, smoothing the path to purchase. And enhanced check-out features offer standard and guest checkout with multiple delivery options.

PIM Implementation: Product information management (PIM) for B2B businesses should be about more than simply implementing a technology solution. Xngage took on a consultative, counselor role, taking the time to really get to know Guest Supply’s core business processes and product data requirements in order to improve them with the right PIM solution.

Digital Growth Services: Guest Supply also wanted to have better insight into how its customers were using the site, so Xngage’s digital growth services team implemented user engagement tracking, user adoption tracking, and monetization reports. The new reports also allow Guest Supply to segment out its U.S. and Canadian customers to get better insight into their unique needs.

The Results

Stutler said that since working with Xngage, Guest Supply has seen its online business grow by 25 percent.

“Xngage has been a tremendous partner — one that feels fully embedded in our business,” he said. “They have a deep understanding of our business and the challenges of our particular market. They’ve brought creative solutions to the challenges we’ve faced, always with an eye on the long-term benefit.”

Due to the nature of their business, Guest Supply often faces very high demand at the beginning of each month. The team at Xngage made sure to craft a stable, reliable environment that could handle the pressure.

“We’ve worked with Guest Supply to ensure their platform is stable and able to ramp up to satisfy the enormous demand generated at the beginning of the month,” said Xngage Team Lead and Architect Michael Stack. “They’re a great partner, and I enjoy solving their problems.”