With worker shortages and supply chain issues keeping your food distribution business in flux, it’s more important than ever to find efficiencies wherever possible, but especially when customers are ordering product. With Order Guides through Prime FoodService Software, food providers can leverage key enhancements to the ordering process to maximize speed, efficiency, and up-sell potential.
Order Guides provide a front end for rapid-order entry and give each salesperson, whether they’re on the phone or in person, the confidence that they have all of the information they need at their fingertips.
Customer-Centric Ordering
Order guides offer all sales-people the ability to see a complete order history for any of their customers, which they can access easily by using name, customer ID, address, or phone number.
Each customer-specific order guide shows all of the items that the customer typically orders as well as any items manually added to the guide, such as up-sell opportunities or new products that may fit the customer’s needs. These products can be added to the guide as you go, including items not usually a part of the customer’s ordering trends. Additionally, ordering trends are tracked, allowing rules to be set up to alert salespeople when those trends are changing or when an order has potentially been missed.
Real-Time Product Data
Full product data is available within the software, such as brand and description, price, stock on hand, if an item is catchweight or special-order, if cases are breakable, and the portion cost. This data is constantly updated as items are added or changed, cutting down on the time needed to input new data. Full order history on the products is just a click away, as is information on out-of-stock items, including when they will be back in stock.
Flexibility and Customization
Users can navigate all this data however they are most comfortable, as Order Guides offers intuitive navigation with keyboard-only or mouse-based options.
Order Guides also give sales-people the ability to set ceiling and floor prices, ensuring that they cannot go over or under those prices, as well as offering the ability to adjust both prices and margins inside the software to ensure a certain price (or margin) is met.
Efficient Ordering Leads to Efficient Delivery
For customers with an existing route set up, Order Guides will show sales-people the next available route, as well as a cut-off time for delivery on that route, ensuring a clean transition from order to delivery.
Moving forward, functionality will soon include the ability to use trends to set up a “shopping list” for customers, leveraging repeat order data to prompt the sales-people to proactively reach out with re-order emails.
By using Prime FoodService Software’s Order Guide, food distribution companies can give their sales-people all the tools they need to quickly, easily, and accurately manage their ordering process, increasing efficiency and opening up a world of up-sell possibilities. These vital tools can give companies a true advantage in the rapidly evolving world of food-distribution.
See Order Guides in Action:
Originally posted April 28, 2020. Updated for relevancy and accuracy.