Infor®, the industry cloud company, today announced that Grosfillex, a leading global manufacturer of high-end resin outdoor furniture and other products, is leveraging the Infor CloudSuite Manufacturing solution — integrated with Infor AI (artificial intelligence), automation and analytics — to boost revenues and sales productivity while increasing customer satisfaction.
The integrated solution enabled Grosfillex to increase revenues by 10 percent and increase sales productivity by 83 percent by automating the process of analyzing and grading customer accounts. The company also used Infor’s AI-driven product recommender to provide the right products at the right time, resulting in greatly improved customer satisfaction.
“In the first week of using the AI dashboard, we saw a 10 percent increase in revenue for a particular set of accounts,” said Grosfillex e-commerce account manager Andrew Rinehimer. “Each salesperson has access to a personalized dashboard with a profitability grading for their accounts and uses this information to create the right sales strategies. What’s powerful is that the AI system is generating these insights for us across hundreds of customers, so sales can focus its time on improving the business and customer experience.”
Grosfillex, with corporate headquarters in Oyonnax, France, has grown from a wooden tool handle family-owned company to a global organization offering a wide range of resin products for residential and commercial use. Its North American operations include manufacturing facilities and distribution centers in Pennsylvania for the Consumer Products Division and the Commercial Products Division.
With more furniture transactions being done online, the company aims to provide a rich experience for customers on its e-commerce site so they can find what they are searching for and view products in the best possible light. In some cases, however, dealers and consumers may overlook or fail to comprehend the extensive array of products available on the e-commerce site. The Grosfillex sales team must identify and dedicate its time to these accounts so that customers are well informed and offered the right products.
Business challenges
Recognizing the importance of analyzing customer profitability to address these issues and grow the business, the Grosfillex sales team faced some significant challenges.
Manual data pulls across multiple systems and extensive profitability analysis, which sometimes took up to three hours for a single account, made it impractical to analyze and manage thousands of customer accounts efficiently. Consequently, the team found itself spending a significant portion of its time with high-profit accounts when it should have been directing more time to invigorating low-profit accounts.
Further, when products went out of stock, customer service representatives sometimes didn’t have the knowledge to recommend a similar product that was in stock to keep customers happy. Activating new customers also was a manual process, which sometimes created delays in delivering products to those customers.
Outcomes
The Infor solution’s AI-driven customer insights empower the Grosfillex sales team to devise new promotional plans, negotiate pricing and contracts, and craft other effective sales strategies swiftly and precisely. Additionally, automated customer grading serves as a valuable tool for gaining insights into the online website experience, which contributes to enhanced e-commerce performance.
The outcomes that Grosfillex has achieved by implementing Infor’s AI solution for customer profitability grading include:
- Increased revenue: 10 percent revenue increase withing a week by expanding the product assortment for a specific group of low-graded accounts. 5 percent increase in gross margin percentage within a month by making pricing adjustments.
- Enhanced sales productivity: 83 percent improvement in sales productivity through the automation of customer profitability grading.
- Improved customer experience: Grosfillex can deliver a more curated product assortment, contributing to better overall customer experience.
- Enhanced online shopping experience: Grosfillex can identify products that may not be well represented on its e-commerce site.
To address the complexities of stock availability, Grosfillex is using Infor’s AI-driven product recommendations, which empowers sales and service teams to suggest alternative products that are currently in stock.
According to Grosfillex CEO Frans Govers, “Managing thousands of products makes it impractical for employees to provide such intelligent recommendations without extensive experience or a tool such as AI. Equipped with Infor’s product recommender, we anticipate fulfilling more orders, leading to increased revenues and heightened customer satisfaction.”
With Infor’s solution, Grosfillex also has automated the entire customer activation process. Now, users can access the Infor Portal to view their assigned tasks and monitor the status of the entire workflow process. This enabled the company to reduce the new customer activation process from 1-to-2 weeks, with its previous manual approach, to only 1-to-2 days with Infor’s automation solution.
Massimo Capoccia, Infor chief innovation officer, said, “Infor is excited to partner with an innovative company such as Grosfillex that is committed to staying at the forefront of its industry. Our cloud technology platform, which provides integrated AI and automation capabilities, is enabling Grosfillex to enhance customer service, employee productivity and more. We started by helping Grosfillex utilize AI and automation to grade customer accounts faster and more efficiently, and we look forward to helping the company further leverage these capabilities to grow its business.”
