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Having the right ecommerce platform can impact not only digital sales but also field sales by empowering field sales agents with a lightning-fast buyflow. That’s a key takeaway from Vexus Fiber’s implementation of Atlas Digital Group’s CORE platform.

With CORE, Vexus Fiber has an omnichannel solution enabling their next-generation digital sales channel to improve the productivity and effectiveness of its door-to-door sales team.

Vexus Fiber is growing one house at a time.

The successful operator, based in Lubbock, Texas, relies on a fleet of 100+ agents to expand its business into markets through door-to-door sales. This approach requires a quick and efficient process to manage crucial tasks such as assigning routes, signing new customers and sending new orders to the back office for handling. All of this happens on digital tablets that Vexus Fiber provides to their sales force.

Door-to-door sales have helped Vexus Fiber grow across key markets. But, as Vexus Fiber prepared for a period of accelerated growth, the company identified a problem: its order entry process was slowing down their sales team – hurting their productivity and detracting from the customer experience.

Sales agents were doing their jobs well, but their supporting technology was not keeping up with their productivity. When agents secured a sale at a customer’s residence, they’d enter necessary data ranging from internet options to payment details. Inputting new orders was a slow, cumbersome process that required each salesperson to manually record pages of data into their tablets in front of the customer – hardly an exciting way to kick off a new relationship.

From there, the information was sent to the Vexus Fiber CRM system, where support teams needed to reenter all the data. Sales agents were wasting as much as 25% of their time each day with order entry.

Shawn Bottema, Vexus Fiber’s Director of Residential Sales, knew there had to be a better way. After thorough research of possible solutions, Vexus Fiber found and secured Atlas CORE.

Making Sales Easier

Atlas Digital Group designed CORE as a purpose-built platform for managing digital sales from start to finish. Most operators use CORE for ecommerce – but the Atlas team knew that CORE would also work for door-to-door sales. How? By giving the sales team the same elegant and easy user interface on their tablets that the Atlas team typically designs for consumer-facing broadband commerce sites.

For Vexus Fiber, Atlas replaced a lengthy online PDF form with a simple registration process consisting of easy-to-use screens that guide the salesperson through the various options a customer would find if they registered online, including agent-specific offers that can be customized for their specific sales teams. With this new process, the only thing a salesperson needs to do is select an offer and enter the customer’s basic billing information.

This new registration interface, designed by Atlas, is faster and more efficient for two crucial reasons:

• The interface is more intuitive; it emulates the simple buyflow that a customer is served on the world’s best ecommerce sites.

• Atlas designed the new interface preloaded with all administrative data that sales agents had to previously enter themselves.

“The salesperson experience is almost identical to the online sales flow,” says Shawn Bottema. “The beautiful thing about it is that a salesperson does not need to manually enter a bunch of data. They just select the applicable products and press the submit button.”

The new registration interface also enables unique sales agent experiences. For example, sales agents can be authorized to offer special pricing options or discounts based upon business rules set by the operator. Those rules can be configured down to the sales agent, market or competitive area.

After details are entered, the order is sent to Vexus Fiber’s CRM. For the automated orders, billing personnel on the back-end don’t need to touch anything, and installations are set up directly from the order. For nonautomated orders, manual intervention is still needed, but the process is light-years faster.

What’s more, Atlas has set up order filters such as the planned installation date so that the order team can prioritize orders. For instance, an order that requires a rapid installation date will be prioritized over those that do not. Vexus Fiber can manage follow-through service more efficiently. Additionally, all the robust analytics and reporting data that come with CORE’s ecommerce solution extend to the field sales channel to guide the business with all insights needed to manage performance.

Successful Change Management

As part of the partnership, Atlas Digital Group worked with Vexus Fiber on a change management program to train the sales agents on how to use the new interface. According to Shawn Bottema, change management was easy. One-day training sessions were set up in each sales office, where the teams were introduced to the new interface. Because the new process is so intuitive, sales agents had no problem learning how to use it.

Vexus Fiber gave their sales team the option of adopting the new way or sticking with the old interface. In response, 100% of the sales team opted in immediately. The new registration interface and system is quicker, easier and simpler – exactly what everyone wanted, and more.

The entire process, from design, building and rollout, happened in just 90 days.

“Atlas Digital Group knows our business,” Shawn says. “They are so experienced that they know what you need before you ask for it.”

Results

Sales agents began to experience a remarkably faster process almost immediately. Entries that could take as long as 30 minutes to complete in extreme cases now require only about 2 minutes.

“Every sales rep says CORE is a game changer,” says Shawn. “The feedback from the sales team has been overwhelmingly positive. CORE takes obstacles out of their way and makes their job easier. CORE has made it easier to acquire new customers.”

In addition, CORE has opened up new possibilities for Vexus Fiber to expand its approach to include more in-person opportunities such as events, where Vexus Fiber employees will be able to sign up customers on the spot. Vexus Fiber also plans to train field technicians on how to use CORE.

“A marketing team member at a golf tournament can become more effective by signing up customers on the spot,” Shawn says. “And technicians servicing residents have opportunities to make sales all the time, but they’ve never had CORE to help them. In the future, when they’re in the field and a potential customer asks them about Vexus Fiber, technicians can sign them up instead of referring them to a call center.”

Shawn says he’s confident that expanding the approach beyond door-to-door sales will succeed, and Atlas Digital Group’s ability to help Vexus Fiber has a lot of do with that.

“I need a partner who doesn’t say ‘No’ when we have a new idea or a question,” Shawn says. “Atlas Digital Group has a can-do attitude. They always figure out a way to get the job done.”

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