Changes to the parts procurement process continue to be driven by improvements to online parts ordering and expedited product delivery. When it comes to the first step in that process – online parts ordering - Meritor aims to address three primary customer needs: self-service, ease of searching, and ease of doing business in general. Meritor’s director of customer loyalty, Christy Westrich, provides insight on the evolution of online parts ordering through MeritorPartsXpress.com, and what the company is working on in the future when it comes to ecommerce platforms for the commercial vehicle market.
Transcription of interview:
Erica Schueller, Fleet Maintenance: Hello and welcome to VSP News: Uptime Update. I am your host Erica Schueller, Editor-in-Chief of Fleet Maintenance magazine, covering all maintenance, all vehicle classes, all management, all the time.
Changes to the parts procurement process continue to be driven by improvements to online parts ordering and expedited product delivery.
When it comes to the first step in that process – online parts ordering – Meritor aims to address three primary customer needs: self-service, ease of searching, and ease of doing business in general.
Meritor’s director of customer loyalty, Christy Westrich, provided insight on the evolution of online parts ordering through MeritorPartsXpress.com, and what the company is working on in the future when it comes to ecommerce platforms for the commercial vehicle market. She first discussed the benefits and the current challenges of online parts ordering.
Christy Westrich, Meritor: The most obvious benefit to procuring parts online is convenience. In today’s world, customers and online purchasers take their personal experiences with online shopping at home to work with them, and so they are constantly trying to get the right product at the right time.
As far as challenges, it would be in purchasing familiar parts. Most commonly, online purchasers are going to purchase parts that they’re very familiar with while they’re shopping online. They’re likely to go to a storefront location for the less familiar parts to them.
For an online provider, it’s vitally important to continue to innovate and give the online purchaser a feeling of shopping store front, even though they’re online. Whether that be 360-degree images where they can get the look and feel of product online just like they’re in the storefront, or whether it's with the visual search interactive models that we have where you can drill down a full axle into 100 different components and select it visually – for instance the brake shoe on the axle model.
Schueller, Fleet Maintenance: MeritorPartsXpress.com recently announced numerous site enhancements for better customer efficiency. Westrich provides some details on these enhancements, and how the Meritor team obtained feedback from users and prioritized updates to the site.
Westrich, Meritor: With our enhancements launched in the fall of 2018, we were really trying to address the three most important customer challenges, which would be ease of searching, self-service and ease of doing business in general.
We provide that with our enhancements through exact search, which allows you to make and model searches for tire inflation systems, king pin kits, that type of thing. Also, you can download PDFs of products specifications and do comparisons over product. Our users can set up guest accounts for their customers, so it's easier for their customers to place orders through them.
As far as listening to our customers, we listen to our customers 800 times a day, when they call into our contact center. Roughly 40 percent of those calls that come in are directly from our technical services department, and each one of those calls is to help the customer find the part that they need. We create a feedback loop from our technical services group into our technology department, so we can provide those self-service tools to our customers.
Schueller, Fleet Maintenance: When it comes to online ordering, finding the right part is always the greatest challenge. Westrich shares some innovations MeritorPartsXpress.com has implemented to address these challenges.
Westrich, Meritor: Visual search is going to be probably the easiest way to find a part now, because you will be able to drill down on a ghost truck online, down into the different systems and components.
With the exact search, you can do make and model search for different product types.
As far as functionality, that’s only a small percentage of it. A lot of it is just the content that’s on MeritorPartsXpress.com. We’re continually adding new content. The value that Meritor brings, in comparison with some other sites is that we’re the actual manufacturer as opposed to just being a distributor.
We have a vast product knowledge that we transfer onto our MeritorPartsXpress.com website, so our customers can tap into our base of information every day.
Schueller, Fleet Maintenance: Adoption of online parts ordering will continue to increase. Westrich emphasizes that customers have prioritized one expectation in particular, which Meritor seeks to continually improve. So, what is it?
Westrich, Meritor: Self-service. That’s going to be critical, especially when you talk about the millennial and post-millennial generations coming into the workforce.
Our customers want to be able to access the information themselves, and call into our customer service department because they choose to, and not because they have to. So you’ll continue to see improvements in order status. You’ll start to see order notifications being sent electronically to customers, even in formats like text messaging.
You’ll also see a lot of improvements in the way that customers cross reference on MeritorPartsXpress.com. We’re doing a complete overhaul of cross reference.
Schueller, Fleet Maintenance: If you’d like more information about the current trends in ecommerce and online parts ordering, check out the link below to access a recent feature story from Fleet Maintenance on this topic.
That’s it for this week’s episode! Thank you for tuning in to VSP News Uptime Update, I’m your host Erica Schueller.
Until our next broadcast, keep up with this, and other industry topics, by visiting us online at VehicleServicePros.com.
Find more information about current trends in ecommerce and online parts ordering.
