2024 Bronze Digital Product

Agency: TRUE

Client: St Austell

Entry Title: From catalogues to clicks

Executive Summary

St Austell Brewery, a prominent player in the South West’s wholesale drinks market, has historically relied on traditional B2B sales methods and a team of telesales operatives to manage and process orders. But with larger competitors encroaching on their territory, the need to innovate became imperative.

Strategy

There were four objectives for the wholesale e-commerce project, with a key success metric to increase the number of digital customers trading through the site:

• Reduce customer service costs by replacing telesales teams and printed brochures with a digital self-service platform

• Boost wholesale revenue through effective merchandising and promotions.

• Enhance wholesale customer satisfaction with a convenient, responsive 24/7 experience

• Gather business intelligence to inform the marketing team’s decisions on customer acquisition, products, promotions and customer experience

Creativity

The project was implemented using progressive technological architecture. Umbraco as a CMS and e-commerce platform was combined with AI recommendation engine Algolia to create a solution that is robust and loads quickly. It also actively gets smarter by learning from user behaviour to make better product recommendations.

Much of the audience had personal relationships with St Austell that spanned decades and business relationships that go back generations. Changes to that relationship came with risk. Some publicans in rural Devon and Cornwall weren’t natural users of digital service channels. By keeping processes simple, paying real attention to user needs and carefully managing the onboarding process, the campaign helped show the advantages of shifting to a digital-first approach: saving time and money.

Results

In the 15 months since the e-commerce platform launched, cost of service has reduced and the wholesale business is now the most profitable part of the St Austell.

In the most recent two months, the site has not received lower than four out of five customer ratings. Qualitative feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, including: “It was the easiest portal I’ve used. Kudos to the team.”

The Team

TRUE - Charles Thibault, Account Director - Dave Jones, Head of Strategy true - Nick Horne Creative Directorr