How to Engage Customers with Surefront - Webinar (6-1-2020)

Hello and welcome everyone. We're going to give the attendees just another minute or two to join. And then we'll get started. My name is Doug. I'm on the product team here at SureFront, and I'll be the host for today's session. Um, we're going to spend the first part of today walking through how to use SureFront to best engage your customers, between setting up a catalog of items, showcasing or creating a virtual showroom to customers, creating quotations or line sheets to customers. We'll go through all of that in the first half of today's session. And then in the second half, we'll turn it around, um, and would love to walk through any questions that you might have. So as we're going through stuff today, if you do have any questions, please feel free to open up the Q&A bubble at the bottom of the chat and type them in there. Again, let's give it maybe just one more minute or so, and then we'll get going here. Okay, again, for everyone just joining us, uh, thank you for jumping in and participating in this webinar. Again, my name is Doug. I'm on the product team here at SureFront. I'm the host for today's webinar, and we host these webinars every 2 weeks or so. This one is kind of a slightly adjusted schedule since last week was Memorial Day. So we will also be hosting another one of these next Monday as well. And then again, 2 weeks again from Monday. We like to use this time to engage our user community, get feedback, and answer any questions you might have, as well as highlight some of the tools that can be really beneficial to each of the users on Shorefront specifically. Um, that being said, today we're going to focus on how to manage catalog products, how to engage your customers with just a few clicks by creating showcases and quotations and line sheets. We'll spend the first half of today's session walking through that, and then we'll spend the second half of this session today fielding any questions as you might have them. So please feel free to enter any questions that you have in the Q&A chat at the bottom of the Zoom call, and in the second portion of today's, today's webinar, we'll go through those questions. So now I'm going to share my screen and start showing you some of the tools in SureFront. So first, let's take a look at the product catalog. The product catalog is your central repository of all of your product data. It's a great place, especially as your team may be working remotely right now, for all of your team members to stay on the same page and to have appropriate access to the products with which you want to engage your customers with. One thing to note about the product catalog is when you create an account in SureFront, the product catalog is only visible to your team members and to the team members that you've given specific access to. So when you're talking about engaging specific customers or potentially many customers, you can use the information in the catalog, but you have to specifically provide access to those customers. So that way you can feel free to manage even your sensitive data within your product catalog because it's only there for you and your team. So now, within the product catalog, we'll dive in a little bit later of how do I create products or how do I upload many products at one time. But once you have products in the catalog itself, you have a lot of really nice options for how you can quickly find the products that you're interested in and get those in front of your customers, whether it's by searching across any kind of product attribute, Maybe it's drilling down within a specific product hierarchy, looking for goods within a portion of that hierarchy. Or you can filter by, you know, date created for the most new things. You can filter by price, you can filter by inventory. And then this last option that we have here is called tagging, which is a really great way to maybe cut across a product hierarchy. Maybe you have something like a back-to-school line that you have in both kids and men's and in women's and maybe even in like art supplies, you can use tagging to really cut across that. And one of the great ways that you can do that is you could tag— right now I have a bunch of ladies clothing here, but whether it's a bunch of ladies clothing or men's clothing, I'm going to create a new tag that maybe I want to call it formal wear. So this would be something that potentially cuts across my product hierarchy as I had it previously set up. We'll call this formal. And now that will allow me to quickly group and find these products that we would classify as formal wear, no matter what part of my product hierarchy they may fall into. So what I'm actually going to do is I'm going to use this tagging feature, and I'm going to search and find— let's Let's see what my new summer styles are gonna be, 'cause I wanna put together a quotation to engage my customers with some of these new summer styles. So here are things that either I or my teammates may have set up for my new summer fashion styles. I'm just gonna select all of these products. And again, before I select all of these and proceed with the quote, you have the ability to visually review, you can get a little bit more information in this Quick View area. And then you can see more in-depth product details on all of these products in your catalog here. This is how you kind of understand what products it is that you want to put in this grouping, that you have the confidence to go ahead and know what it is that you're putting on this quote before you make it. But anyways, we're going to select all of those styles, and now we're going to proceed with creating a quotation. So now in SureFront, there are two main ways of engaging your customer. From the catalog specifically. One of them is creating a customer-specific quotation. This is where you can give individualized pricing and quantities for specific customers. And then the other one is by creating a showcase, which we'll dive into after we do the quotations, which is more of your broadcast tool. Hey, I'm releasing a new catalog, I want to send this out to all of my customers or all of my customers in a certain segment. That's what the showcase is. So For now, we'll proceed by selecting these items and creating a quotation. We're going to select the customer we want to create this for. Let's say the retail customer for an import quotation, and we'll call this Summer Styles. So now when we created this quotation here We have a draft view of this before it ever goes out, and I want to walk through a couple of the things that are available on this draft view. The first thing that I want to call attention to is this messaging panel over here. If you have multiple sales team members that you're working with, is specifically on a given customer segment or customer account, you can message among your team as you're putting together these quotations for that customer. So that you can finalize the details of what products you have on the quotation, what quantities you're offering, even down to maybe what costs you're offering to the customer, given the different nature of each of those customers. Within this table view of the quotation, you also have some information here that is private just to your team, in addition to this private team chat. So I can see, you know, if I'm buying this from a factory or if I'm reselling this item, I can see who my original supplier is for each of these items. Items. I can see what my cost is for each of these items, my landed cost, and my margin. So as I'm going here to customize pricing for this specific customer, I can get immediate feedback. How does that impact my cost and my margin? But again, all of those, those items will remain private even when you send this quotation to your customer. So you can come in here and put in different quantities of these items. And then you'll notice as I start to do that, it's going to build out a high-level— what's the total price of this going to be for my customer? It's going to give me a breakdown on my total cube, on my overall margin. Um, this will just give me that feedback as I'm making these edits basically in line here. You can see as we get down to one of these other products that we have this one we might offer in different sizes. If you have those as different options, we can also cover that later about how to set up maybe a color or size run for these different apparel items. But just know for now, you don't have to set it up like that. However you want to set up your product that works best for you, that's totally up to you. But as you're going through and you're finalizing the details of this quotation, you can enter in these quantities for, for products that are either color and size run specific, or products that don't have any kind of child components or bills of material. So as I get to the point where I'm finalizing this quote, I can even pop over here and maybe if I want to notify, uh, my sales manager or someone above me on the team to come in and take a look at this quotation, I can use this nice @mention tool to be able to find members of my team and ask them to come in here and review the quotation before I send it. And then whenever it does look finalized to me, I can send this quotation to a customer. So one of the, the really cool things about SureFront that sets us apart from many other tools that help you make line sheets or quotations is many other tools you can make those line sheets and quotations and then you pretty much have to export them as a PDF and then email that PDF to your customer, or you can only use them if your customer is already signed up and is already paying for the tool. The nice thing about SureFront is even if your customer isn't already on board, although many probably are, even if your customer isn't already on board, all you need to engage them is just their email. So I'm going to type in an email, let's see, with today's date, 0601@surefront.com, and I'm going to say, check out these new summer Styles. So now as soon as I send this quotation, it's immediately showing that we're no longer in the draft stage. We have a list of users, both my customer users and any of my teammates, that have access to this quotation. And you can see here we also have this brand new chat that's going to be available to my customers and my team so that we're able to respond and engage them. But now what I'm going to do is I'm going to pop over and I'll show you what this looks like from your customer's point of view. So let me bring over this. Um, this is going to be what the quotation looks like that they're receiving. So you can see your customer is going to see you have 11 new products that have been sent on a quote to you from Fairview Stores. And you can see the seller here, Doug Heckman, has said, "Check out these new items," and you get this really nice preview as well of what these items might look like. And again, we just created a brand new email address here for today's webinar. One of the things that's really fantastic about SureFront is all your customer has to do is click on this email, and I'm going to open this in an incognito window since we're already signed in, in, in the regular browser session. But all they have to do is click on that email and it's going to drop them right into that quotation itself. So now rather than having to review a PDF line sheet without having to go through and look at thumbnail images on maybe an Excel sheet, your customer is dropped directly into the system where they can start liking products that they're interested in. They can message you, hey, do you have any more Sleeveless dresses. They can also get the benefit of this nice, um, informationally dense table view. And again, um, the items that appear in black here versus the items that appear in purple, these are going to be private to their team. So if you toggle back over here, you can see, okay, what's private to my team they can't see, but then what's shared with my team, like the unit price, they're able to see is their unit cost. You're now able to use Shorefront as really the most engaging, most immersive way to collaborate with your customers around quotations and around line sheets. And then your customer, of course, can also drill down into the item-specific details. They can see these really nice high-quality images. They can enter any kind of questions they might have about specific materials, and this will show up in line for your team to be able to engage them and answer, almost like a concierge, concierge-type service. On your side of things, you're able to see when you come in here, okay, my customer is immediately messaging here. Any of your team members with access to this quotation are now able to immediately engage them and respond back in the platform You can see which of the items your customer likes, so you can start to indicate on which of these might be their favorite to push them towards the sale. And you can review any changes or questions that your customers are making on these quotations. Best of all, from your customer's perspective, as these different items become more finalized, as you're negotiating on prices and as you're negotiating on quotes, they can quickly select the items that they're interested in, and then they can create an order in the system for these products where they can now specify things like, uh, their final quantities, their destination. We're going to send this to New York, and let's say that the ship window is for a couple of weeks from now. They're able to do this all after just having to open that email. They never have to sign up for the platform. All they have to do is click on that email and this will drop them directly into the platform where they're able to engage with the quotation that you sent them, finalize the item information, and then pick out their favorites that they want to proceed with and create an order and send that order directly to you. So now I've just been able to receive a commitment via Shorefront when all I had to do was take a few clicks from products in my catalog, send that quotation to the customer, and all they had to do was open the email, find their favorites, and create an order. And now here I am being able to quickly go from creating a quotation to receiving an order or a commitment, um, all within minutes, all with using great engagement tools within SureFront. So now let me pop back out to the catalog for a second. That, uh, quotation workflow is one really great detailed tool when you're talking about making specific quotations or line sheets to specific customers under customized terms. Any of the alterations that you may make to price or to quantities or even to the attributes of the items in those cases are all saved, localized to that quotation into that order. They don't affect the items in the catalog. That way you can offer maybe a high-volume customer a different price or different terms than you would offer most of your other customers and that doesn't necessarily update the item information in the catalog. So the next tool that I want to talk about is building a showcase. And showcases are a great engagement tool, especially when you're looking to broadcast out to multiple customers. So let's find those same summer styles we were just looking at, and instead of creating a quotation this time, we're going to showcase them to multiple customers. Let's select all of those styles and hit Showcase. So I'm going to click— let's do that retail customer again, Doug Plus 06-01, and let's say we'll show the price and send them an email. And then we'll also send this to the women's buying department over at Pacific Buy and Co. And we could select any or all of these that you might want. This again is a really great tool for an asymmetric distribution of these items where it's one-to-many of your customers so that they can review and take action from there. And I'm gonna say, "Check out these new summer styles." Great. Now I will pull back up and show what that email is going to look like. Here we can see this new email address that we had created a couple of minutes ago. We're also getting a similar email with your picture, with your company name, with a preview of all of the nice products that you have in SureFront. And again, all your customer has to do is click on this email. Again, I'll open it in an incognito window since we're already signed in on the other one, and they're going to have all of these items able to review in more of a, uh, catalog showcase type format. You can think of this as more of your virtual showroom where you have just a preview of these items. Now, your customers are going to be able to search, sort, and filter items. So if you're sharing, rather than maybe a specific quotation that has a dozen items on there, if you want to share 50 items or 100 items, maybe it's your whole new catalog that you're putting out there for the summer, your customers have the ability to quickly make those search, sorts, and filters to find what items that they're looking for. Once they find the items that they're looking for, They can select the items they're interested in and they can request a quote, which will drop them into this nice quotations tool that we just discussed, that we just went through, that's going to allow, enable your team to really engage them quickly while they're on the platform and respond to their needs real time as they're asking you for more specific detail about those items that you share. Okay, so the next thing that I want to briefly walk through— I know that we've been getting some questions about how am I getting product information into the catalog in the first place. So let me take a quick moment to look at that. One of the great ways, uh, one of the great things about SureFront is you don't need much information to get started. If you just have a handful of items, unlike other systems, you don't have to put in 100 data fields or 50 data fields to get started. You can start with just an item number and an image to help you get going to engage your customers. And one way to do that, if you just have a handful of different items that you want to create, you can click on this Create New Product here, and we'll call this ABCD124, and we'll say, let's put this also in our apparel category, and maybe we'll just say we know this is a blue dress. That's really all the information that I need to get started. But of course, if I have more information than that, I'm always able to add that information in here. I can drag and drop one or many images into the image feature style here, which just allows me to be able to quickly get the, the key item information into the catalog so that I can start engaging my customers. Of course, the more information that you put in here, the more useful it's going to be to your team and the more prepared you're going to look to your customer and put yourself in a better place to be able to win. One of the other nice things here that we can dive into maybe at a later session is all of the, um, all of the attributes in here are completely customizable. So you can go up into the administration into this area called Page Views, and you can build, um, any kind of page view that you want, which can include additional user-defined fields. It can include a bunch of additional fields that you might not see right out of the box here. That's all available through the administration. Just takes a couple of minutes to set up, but you're able to fill out as much or as little information as you have here to get started. Let me also hop back out and take a pause too before I jump into the catalog upload to see if we have any questions coming in. Okay, no questions yet. That's totally fine. Um, we'll keep on going then to how to upload many products at one time to your catalog. So that it really helps you build out this nice central repository of product information that enables your teams to engage your customers really easily. So I'm going to sign out here into a different account that doesn't really have much product information yet. Let me sign in there. So here is what it's probably, um, more likely to look like if you've just signed up for SureFront and you're starting to build out your catalog. Remember, you can always create products just with this Create Product button, which might be easiest if you just have like a handful of products that you want to get up onto the system and share with your customers. Or you can pop over to the bulk upload over here. One thing that's important to reference for this bulk upload is just looking at your category ID reference. Here you can see I just have one category ID. If I had already spent more time in here and I was starting to set up a full product hierarchy, you'd be able to assign category IDs to each folder within that product hierarchy so that you could upload even thousands of products and have them automatically categorized for you. But here, this is very simple. If you, let's say, you just signed up 5 minutes ago, this is what it's going to look like for you. You can see, okay, this is the product or the category ID that I need to upload this to my system. I'm going to take a spreadsheet that I have that already has some product information in here. You can see that there's only 3 required fields to be able to import this product information into your catalog. That's column B, which is the item number. Column C, which is a parent item number. So if you have child items like components for product sets like tables and chairs, or maybe as a color and size run for things like dresses or for shirts, you specify those differently here where you might have ABCD and then DEF, which is the parent item number where you have size small, medium, large under the same parent item number. But again, only these 3 columns here are required. Everything else I can enter in as much or as little information as I have. You can see I've kind of sparsely entered in things for the carton information, the colors, the cube description, some of your key information. One thing that's also really nice and that I would encourage you to do— this is not required, but I think that it would be very helpful for you to quickly get high-quality data in front of your customers. Which is to come into this column that says Image File Names and delineate any of the file names that are associated with that specific item. So if you have a file name that matches the item number, um, SureFront will automatically find that whenever you're uploading. But let's say that you have 10 different images that match a specific item number. You can just enter those all in this column, um, just with a comma separation. And then this is going to allow us to import many images at one time into Shorefront without having to do a lot of finding individual products and dragging and dropping. We can do that all in one bulk motion. So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to download this as a CSV and then hop back over here to the catalog upload, and we're just going to drag and drop this in here. and you can see right away I just created 12 brand new products. If we want to see what those look like, we can pop back over here. You can see all of these products so far we haven't uploaded the images to, which is no big deal. We'll do that in a second. But then when we come into each of these items right away without having to create them individually and enter each of these field values in individually, we have decent data in here including cost, including price. Including like your key item information like description and color and stuff. So it's a really easy way to set up, especially if you have 10 or 20 or 100 or 1,000 items. It's easy to set it up first in Excel and then drag and drop it in here to quickly create all of your different products. So now let me take a second and hop back over to the upload. And since I had that sheet set up with Image file names. I'm going to bring up a bunch of those image files here. You can see I have a bunch of these image files in here, maybe like 50 or so. Let me just drag and drop those into the image section here, and this should take just a minute or so. This will be dependent on, on how quick your bandwidth is, but even I guess as we're broadcasting the video call, you can see that all of these images are quickly uploading and they're going and hunting down all of the specific products that we had set up within that sheet. One other important thing to notice— to note is as you're uploading these images, it's important to stay on this page. This is all happening in your browser. So I know this will take maybe a minute or so to upload 50 images. It probably takes a couple of minutes if you have like 150 or 300 images. But leave this tab open as this is happening because it needs to be open to complete this process for the image upload. But now you can see all 52 out of 52 images that we brought in here have successfully uploaded and found the products that we had assigned them to. And when we come back over to the products here, you can see that each of these products has a handful of different images to it that, in addition to setting up those individual product details, you now have lots of different images for those products as well. So now again, I want to take a moment and pause to see if there are any Q&As that we can answer. Let's see. When you upload images, will it tell you if there is no style for the image or if there are duplicate images for the same style? That's a great, great question. So let me come back here. Since this is a webinar, obviously I found things that all have homes for these images. But if we pop out and let's actually first look at the duplicate image question because that's a really good one. So here's all of the ones that we just uploaded, all 52 of those, and let's see what this image looks like that way we can compare it. Okay, so we're going to see if this image will upload a duplicate. Now, I know that what we do on the back end of things is we check for image similarity using a hash style. So if there's a duplicate image, which actually happens all the time where people try to upload like the same set of 1,000 images, you don't want to have to hunt through all of those. SureFront will actually just ignore it if it's the same image, which is again kind of determined by different hash styles. So I think the one that we were looking at for that is this product. This product you can see has exactly 4 images. Including this image that we just looked at. So when we come back over to the upload— let me bring this over— come back over to the upload and we drag and drop this in here, um, it's going to give you a success. That way when you're uploading like 1,000 of them, it's not disrupting the process. But when you come back over to the products, you can still see that this one only has 4 images including the image that we looked at. It's not creating duplicates for that so that you're not starting off with lots of extra data in there. So then the second question was, if an image isn't part of the data that you've pre-uploaded, which means it either doesn't match the item number with its file name or it was not included in the file name field that was given in the, in the bulk upload process, let's take one of those and we'll show you kind of the feedback that it gives you if you're uploading one of those. So let me pop back out to a bigger folder that includes an image that we don't have a home for. We'll drag and drop that. Maybe we did have a home for that one. Let's see. Let's find something else entirely. Maybe I'm getting lucky or maybe I'm wrong on this one. No new images uploaded. Well, now when I think I might have to find a better image that I know isn't a part of this dataset. So I'll put that together for the next webinar here. Let's see, any other questions that I can dive into about how to set up your catalog, about how to use this catalog of product information that you've just set up to keep your team on the same page or to engage customers with a quotation. We'll give it just a couple of minutes here, and if any more of those questions come in, then, then that's great. If not, we'll be providing a recording of this session so that you can reference it for you and your team members. All of these sessions are recorded. If you ever want a copy of it, please let us know. We'll send you a link so that you and any team members who maybe weren't able to join today are able to see what it is that we went through. So just a brief recap. We covered how to use your product catalog to quickly find the products that you're looking for, whether by searching by attributes, filtering by newness, creating different groups by tags. We covered how to create products, including uploading them in bulk to your catalog. And we covered how to use tools like quotations and line sheets and showcases or virtual showrooms to really create a best-in-class buying experience for your customers. Remember, during this time when your customers aren't going to be able to travel to your showroom or go to trade shows, giving them the best experience to make up for that, um, using a tool like Shorefront that has really high-quality images that has real-time chat and notifications to allow you to be your customer concierge is going to help you win over your competition that might be using an Excel line sheet with thumbnail images that are only so big and that your customer has to type out 25 emails back and forth about those products before they're finally emailing you a commitment. We touched upon how easy that was right at the beginning of this session. And like I mentioned, we're happy to provide any work recordings for you or your teammates if you want to dive deeper into that. One final thing that I'd like to cover as well, while you're using the SureFront system, if at any point in time you have any questions, how do I do something, can you help me on something, all you have to do is come up to this little question mark tool up here. If you click this open, you're going to be able to either chat directly with our team or find any kind of help articles or tutorials just by searching in this search bar, which will bring up some of the most related results, or you can go all the way to our full tutorial center, which has over 100 articles, both in English and in Chinese, to be able to find any of the help that you're looking for within SureFront. So please never hesitate to reach out. We're really here to help you and your business succeed using SureFront. And to give you and your customers the best experience possible, especially virtually. Is this better for a company that has a line of items that doesn't change but once or twice a year? Yeah, great question. So we see this being used with companies that are very, very new item focused, um, with great value. So we have customers Some of them are creating dozens of new items a month. Some of them are creating hundreds of new items a month and thousands of new SKUs a year. Whether that's, I'm sharing thousands of new SKUs a year, especially in like private label development. We see, you know, you got to share 100 SKUs back and forth to actually finalize on a dozen or so SKUs that are going to end up making it. We see it kind of run the gamut there. So whether it's, I have a core staple of items, that I'm always selling, I'm always selling black leather jackets in the fall, and I'm always selling, you know, leather handbags and stuff in the spring. You're able to use this and have it work really well for you and your customers, whether you have a frequently changing assortment like many of our users do, or even if more of your items are a little bit more stable. But again, really great question, and the thing that I'd like to focus on there is Anytime that you're presenting this item information, you want to be presenting it with a tool like Shorefront that gives really high-quality images, gives you really the ability to quickly respond to your customer needs and questions and interactions, rather than putting it in the tool like Excel or PDF that you have to email to your customer. Whoever is creating that best customer experience, especially at a time where customers and buyers aren't flying across the country and wearing a mask for 5 hours to get to your showroom, is going to be the person that's winning compared to their competition. Great, great question. So I don't see too many new questions coming in here. Again, if there are any questions or anything, any help that you need, please feel free to reach out to us. You can reach out via the chat tool on our website. If you're already a user, you can reach out by clicking on that question mark and starting a chat with us. And if you want, you can also email me directly, Doug@SureFront.com, if you'd like a copy of this webinar to share with you or your teammates, if you would find it helpful. We do these every 2 weeks, but since this one was a push from last Monday, Memorial Day, where we weren't doing webinar, we will actually be hosting another one of these next Monday. So please feel free to share this with any teammates who might not have had the opportunity to join today. And we're again really here to see you and your business succeed using SureFront and giving your customers the most engaging experience possible. So with that, I'm going to conclude the webinar, and thank you all so much for joining us.