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hello and welcome to today's webinar self-serve web portals for propane customers this is brought to you by our sponsor ad systems I'm Alison bar watts from North Coast media digital editor for LP gas magazine and I will be your event manager before we begin I'm going to go over some ways that you can participate during today's presentation although you are currently in a listen-only mode we encourage you to ask questions throughout the presentation just type in the text box at the bottom left then click Submit to place your question in the queue you can also submit questions via twitter by using the hashtag add webinar questions that were submitted during registration have already gone to our panelists and may be covered in this webinar some questions may also be answered in an upcoming issue of LPS magazine or in one of our e-newsletters we strive to answer as many of your questions as possible if you experience any technical difficulties during today's event use the same Q&A box at the bottom left to tell us about your issue and click Submit an assistant producer Kelly Lindberg or I will personally assist you finally a recording of this webinar will be available tomorrow afternoon at LP gas maravene comm slash webinars you can get to that page now in book market by clicking on the header above your slides a link to the on-demand recording will also be emailed to you when it is available now I like to preparing today's event over to our moderator I'll be guest editor Brian Richardson thanks Alison technology is one of the more popular topics for us to cover to LP gas magazines as we see younger generations transitioning into the industry the use of technology or retail operations is growing but it's not only generational factors at play the technology advancements out there today allow retailers to add efficiencies to their businesses while also strengthening their connections to customers the benefits are simply too good to ignore and the industry is taking notice one of the companies working in this technology space today is new jersey-based software provider ad systems to help explain how propane retailers can use some of this technology is John Redmond the vice president of product strategy for ad systems John has more than 30 years of experience in the petroleum and propane industries he's currently responsible for determining the strategic development direction of all AG systems in our lead up to this webinar you've seen a lot of references to web portals and self-service John is here to explain that terminology and what it means for you and your customers ladies and gentleman here is John Redman thanks Bryan appreciate it it's always great to work with up you guest magazine and we appreciate your providing the platform today for today's discussion in in presentation I'm going to start off a little bit with a brief agenda so folks know what what we're going to be talking about today in a high-level but one common actually before I get started here it's interesting is part of preparing for today's webinar I took a look at the top 50 publication in LP gas magazine every year the magazine publishes the top 50 propane marketers in the country and I did a bit of an unscientific survey and looked at each one of the websites for each one of the top 50 companies in the in the listing and discovered it looked like about 19 out of the top 50 propane marketers today are either not offering self service over their website or if they are it appeared to be fairly rudimentary so it kind of reinforces maybe the appropriateness of today's discussion because the market certainly I believe is looking for self-service capabilities and in the market I think it's somewhat has to catch up with where the consumer is today so at a high level the agenda today I'm probably going to talk a little bit about who ad systems is we're going to take a little bit of a look back at self-service history a little bit of a trivia trivia type exercise we're going to what we're going to talk about why maybe you should be considering authoring self-service if you're not already we're going to talk about some of the basic types of things that you could offer over a self-service portal and then perhaps some of the more advanced things that companies are doing today then we're going to talk about there's various ways of implementing self-service the technology piece how do you go about offering self-service from a technology perspective we're going to talk about the importance of determining and defining your business rules today when consumers call your office there are certain business rules I'm sure you apply to the conversation you have with your customer how do you handle a customer that's on credit hold is and ample so it's important to think through those business rules if you're going to extend the process out to your self-service portal now we're going to talk a little bit about connecting all of the various technologies and today that are available that would fit the self-service model and we're going to use the delivery order to cash process as the example there are many examples but I chose to use delivery order the cash today as the example then we're going to have some recommendations on how to go about implementing self-service over over your website and then to wrap up in the Q&A process okay so brief a little bit about ad systems we're a privately held company we were founded back in 1973 where technology company that basically is focused on serving the petroleum and propane arena that's all we do we have about 160 employees spread about four offices we have about 500 clients we have the client implementations in over 46 states and each one of the Canadian provinces and then you can see below the the list of the offices in in both US and Canada our market focus again is strictly propane and petroleum so we focus on the propane market that's one of the fastest-growing pieces of our business we also have a very large presence in the heating oil market and we have a lot of customers that sell both propane and heating oil today we have a big focus in HVAC as the market has looked for other ways to drive revenue more and more companies are getting involved in full-blown HVAC type service we also have a wholesale offering for both the petroleum the propane market we deal in the lubricant distribution space and then also we have a very robust package that addresses the convenience to our market also ok a little bit of self service history trivia here I found this fairly interesting actually as I prepared for this presentation the first first self-service gasoline station was formed back in June of 64 in Westminster Colorado where people could pull in and pump their own gas today that's pervasive obviously across the country it's actually difficult to find a station that what if somebody will cannot pump gas for you other than New Jersey and I think that's one of the state does not legally support self-service the other one I found interesting is the Chemical Bank back in the late 60s put a what the time called a cash machine at one of their ranch offices on Long Island today we would refer to it as an ATM machine but it was a cash machine because you were assigned a card which defined how many dollars would come out of the machine when you put the card in the machine so I could have a $25 card somebody else could have a $50 card and it would dispense the appropriate amount of cash and I love this advertisement they ran they actually ran an advertisement that said we will open up September 2nd and never close again so one of my themes has always been in self-service you cannot staff your office for the busiest day of the year it's financially impractical to do that so why not offer self-service for the customers that desire that method of dealing with you is a propane marketer another example of a little bit of self-service history the first check-in kiosk continental airlines back in 1995 so if you think about today over 80% of passengers today and it's probably a little bit higher than that checking electronically either over a website or at the kiosk at the at the airport the one I found most fascinating is back in 1994 there was a company called abre formed and the attorney for the owner of this company suggested he change the name of the company because people were referring to it as cadaver and lo and behold when that company changed their name it is now amazon.com and we certainly probably all understand the impact that Amazon has had on the retail industry and self-service and even the package delivery business today so let's talk about why you offered self-serve you know it's interesting actually a lot of these presentations over the years I've heard focus on the Millennials that the Millennials are the ones that are driving this I think there's there's some truth to that and if you look at the picture on the on the lower right hand side there are three melodies well any sitting on a park bench with their smartphones in their hand and the joke here is they're actually talking to each other but they're talking through their smartphone devices rather than turning and having a verbal conversation but in reality I think the whole market now is looking for self-service so about if I use myself as an example if you saw the photograph earlier I am clearly not a millennial I actually lost my hair back in the in the prior century actually but just myself in the last three or four days giving some examples of my self service world I was up on Florida Power and Light I live in Orlando and I was checking and see what my power bill was because it's warmer than normal this year and it was less rain so I wanted to see whether my power bill is more expensive this year than last year so I was up on FPL website I was able to check my my current balance and they actually pushed the message at me to promote the idea of me going on a budget program I was recently in for my annual checkup with the doctor and part of that checkup process is to get blood tests so I signed up on quest Diagnostics website to get notification when my latest latest what results were available so I've actually looked at that report before I even visited the doctor my wife and I are considering going on a vacation we like cruising so I've actually submitted a request to cruise compete.com to get competitive bids on the cruise that we're looking at and I've already received bids from eight to ten travel agents across the country what they're offering I no longer get a newspaper delivered I read Florida today online there's a hurricane developing out near the Bahamas that everybody down here in Florida is talking about so I've signed up to get instant notifications as the status of that storm changes so I'll be more informed and then last but not least this morning I get an email but let me know what might be pnc bank balances because I've signed up for that notification all of those things in historically I would have been making a phone call for to find out or I would make the phone call at all I just would not be as informed as I am today on some of these self-service so the theme here is it's just not Millennials looking for self-service one interesting exercise would be to do a survey of your own employees asking them what self-service experience how they had let's say in the last two weeks and make a list up and then compare what their consumer experiences with a bunch of other companies versus what you're currently offering today that may be the driving force for you to decide we need to look at this self-service thing and maybe start moving down the path of offering an alternative for the customers that want to go in that direction the other benefit certainly of self-service would be the increased value of website rather than just be a bulletin board possibly drive revenues result via website so if you have a very good user experience from your website perspective you have the opportunity to promote new products or possibly services to increase revenue and probably as important as anything to grow your business without adding CSRs in the office that you're at your call center this is an interesting survey that Delpy gas magazine did back in February of this year there was a whole section on a survey that was done that reflected the hourly rates that the propane market pays people in different roles within the company so in this case I've highlighted a customer service rep so on average across the country the average salary is about 15.3 five cents an hour which really would equate to about forty one thousand dollars a year full time employee including benefits and historically we have seen that you know an average CSR on average is handling maybe between a thousand to 1,500 accounts so you could grow your business or possibly acquire a business without necessarily growing with the people that are answering the phone so let's talk a little bit about some self-service options to consider it or if you're not doing self-service today I always recommend you crawl before you walk before you run so the basic level of self-service I believe today would be let the customer look at some transaction history maybe their payment history maybe their delivery history certainly show them what their balance is and offer a way of paying that was from your website it's very interesting my first experience with self-service goes back to the early 2000s and I was dealing with a very large energy marketer and they were looking to be one of the first companies in the market to offer self-service and they did a very detailed analysis of the type of phone calls they get from their customers and it was fascinating to find out that a high percentage I think it was as much as 20% of the phone calls they they would receive at their call center was simply a customer wanting to know how much money do I owe you why not offer that as your first step into self-service in effect all right a little bit more advanced self-service options is to start to accept delivery orders over the web now the reason I put that under advance we'll talk about business rules there's certain business rules that you apply to a process of taking in order from a customers today if they call the office we believe some of those business rules should be extended out to a self-service offering hence we put it under the more advanced area as far as self-service is concerned accept service orders and when we say service orders here we're talking about scheduled service orders and non scheduled service orders and I think during the QA process we'll talk about in more detail of some of the business rule decisions you should should consider what if you're going to start to schedule service work orders over your website some other options possibly bill presentment let the customer come to your website to get their monthly statement possibly or their delivery invoice or maybe even deliver it electronically so they wouldn't necessarily have to go to your website to pull that down some additional advanced capabilities could be offer the sign ups for pricing plans possibly maybe pre buy plans tied that into risk management a lot of the web portal developers that we deal with offer richman risk management so we can see the sign ups versus what you're committed gallons are from your supplier potentially in this world typically it's a kind of a legal agreement so the customer could be signing a document electronically over the web the same thing would go for like lease agreements rather than having your customer spend ten minutes on the phone with a CSR filling out a lease agreement give the customer the option to go to your website and fill out the agreement and capture the signature I think in both these cases the idea war would be that your back-office system has the ability to capture that legal document so it becomes a permanent record of that customer long term okay let's talk about the marketing capability here and again this is some of the advanced type features a number of the web portal developers that we deal with not only offer the basic self service that we just talked about they offer marketing capabilities so this is an example that one of our partners provided that's
when where the data is being mined when the customers on the foot on the web portal so in this case the customer owes us thirteen hundred ninety nine dollars so we're playing a marketing message to promote possibly going on the budget program so that you know is that message you don't want to play that message on the web to a customer it's already in the budget plan you don't want to waste your time reading a message on some marketing were or a pricing capability that they're really on only push it to a customer that you want to sign up on a given budget plan possibly another example this example was provided by one of our partners prime media where it's a will call customer that's up on the website and in this case this little bit of a marketing piece that's been put together to promote that customer switching from will call to automatic possibly they're on the web right now attempting to place of delivery order and certainly the marketer is much better off if their customers on automatic delivery they will call so this message would only be pushed to a customer that it's currently a will call customer and again it's part of the mining the data that is locked away in your back office system why not use that data for promotional capabilities over your website in this case we're going to send a coupon we're going to present a coupon over the portal so again why you don't want to offer this $200 off of this furnace installation to every single customer so if you can see the bottom of the screen through the portal development you're defining who's going to get that coupon it's only going to be automatic delivery account that are enrolled on the budget account that have a zero balance in which you can define their criteria on who you're going to offer the marketing program to now these are really two kind of simple examples this type of marketing through data mining can get very sophisticated and very very finite as far as who you're posing the marketing opportunity to some more advanced options to consider and these are options that would be dependent upon having other technologies involved within your business in the words if you've got the onboard delivery technology on your delivery trucks and they're wirelessly enabled why not give the customer statuses even through push text messages or email or just a posting on your website that they can log in I'm at work I requested a delivery I want to know if that delivery has taken place that's exactly what happens today if that consumer orders a package on Amazon and the product you're delivering propane is a much more important product to that customer likely than whatever they are ordered on Amazon and husband and wife today are you typically both working there not at home so they would like to check the status of that delivery or had that status pushed for them that delivery was made when the delivery wasn't me possibly because the gate was locked or the cheque wasn't available or those types of things so some Advanced Options in the service world if you've got wireless technology that your service technicians are carrying around the same type of thing to be handled here when the work order is assigned to a technician the notification can be delivered to the portal or via of push technology when it's dispatched when it's when the technician arrives when the work is completed again consumers are used to dealing with many many companies this way my guess is your consumer is not comparing you two against the local the other local propane marketer your consumer more and more is comparing you against the FedEx's of the world the Amazons of the world UPS's of the world those type of companies they expect that level of service today another option to consider again these are all dependent upon other technologies if you do in tank monitoring today why not present the tank monitor gallons or the percentage on the web portal so the customer thinks they need in order and they have a tank monitor or the customers just concerned that you know we get the first cold weather forecast depending on where you in the country it's a-you know coming up on October October everybody thinks they needed delivery because it's the first blow of cold weather coming through why not present the the the in tank gallons based on what the tank monitor says is in the tank okay now let's talk a little bit about the different types of ways implementing self-service we believe there's like three core ways of going about implementing service self-service there's a technique that we historically have worked refer to as speaker net in that world you have a form possibly on your website where the customer could go in and request a delivery that approach has some strengths because it's probably simple to implement but it has a whole lot of weaknesses and we're going to talk about the pluses and minuses of each one of these approaches as we go through the slides there's also something called the dump and load approach which we'll talk about in more detail as I go through that slide and then there's real-time web services approach which happens when the approach that systems the utilizes in the marketplace with our with our website development being partners so using the sneakin sneakernet method and in each case we're going to talk about a delivery order as far as the the process that the consumer wants to do so on the right hand side we've got a we got a lady out on the web consumer on the web and she wants to order 200 gallons in the speak Annette world there is no real connection between the consumer on the web and your back-office enterprise system in the sneakernet world typically what will happen is that order is placed through some sort of form on your website and then email typically would get generated and then what happens is on the left hand side of the screen somebody in your csr group would have to pick up that email and enter it in to your enterprise system well the downsides of that approach are there's really no account validation because there's no login process we're not validating who that who that person is there's no consumer information available to that to the consumer over the web in other words they can't see what their balances they can't see what their last payment is I can't see when they're due for delivery none of that would be available there's no real-time credit status check taking place so that person that's on that web at 11 o'clock at night could only $500 and they could be over 90 days they just think they can sneak in at night and you'll want to deliver in tomorrow well then in that case if the customers on credit hold you would only discover that when the CSR attempts to put the order in and now you're faced with having to call the customer back you really haven't saved any office time in effect you have it you're not really gaining an ROI you may be offering a pseudo web server web self-service over your web but there really isn't an ROI on the backend part of the system in sneakernet method also there's no tank size validation so this consumer could have a a 5 hunting a line tank and they could be putting a thousand gallon order in again you would likely catch that when you put your order into your enterprise or back office system but you're not really saving time and in this world in the sneakernet world the most important bullet here is the order would have to be created manually in your enterprise or a back office system okay the dump and load method again using delivery order as the example what dumping load basically means is typically once a day you take data from your enterprise or back office system and you dump it into a replicated database so in effect the minute you dump it it starts to become stale so the example here is again the concern is on the web they order 200 gallons in the dump and load approach you could offer account validation because you could offer a login where the customers logging in you could offer you could show them some account information but it could be stale I there's no you could could do a credit status check but again that could be stale or what I mean by that is maybe a payment was posted after the dump of the database was done so we're not really dealing with real-time data in a dumping load approach the data gets stale each minute that goes by after the dump took place you could do the tank size versus order validation with dump and load but again in this world you're still faced with having to create the order manually in the enterprise system so in these first two methods you may not be as likely to promote self-service because you're really not saving much work on the back end of the process if the office process the approach we've taken historically with our clients that run our back office system is we take a web services approach to both delivery order and really all of the self-service items that we offer in the marketplace because in a in a web services method in our case we have a product called smart connect which basically exposes back-end office capability through a secure methodology to the consumer on the web so in a web services approach the account validation takes place the account information is available in current it's basically the same information that you CSR would be looking at so that payment that got posted if it's on the account the consumer on the web will see the payment on their account the tank size in order validation takes place obviously there are business rules and validation that can be applied here the same business rules that why in our back-office system are applied over the web so if the customer attempts to place a thousand gallon order on a 500 gallon tank it will not let them do that it'll let them know that they're putting in an order and larger than their tank basically and probably the most important thing here is in this world the order is created live in the enterprise system so now we're really gaining the ROI that interaction that would typically take place by the consumer quality and the CSR and statistics say that an average phone call from a customer takes about 10 to 12 minutes so the best of this world here is that we not only eliminated the phone call to the office but we've offered it to a consumer that would prefer not to make that phone call they would prefer to deal with you over the web ok so a little bit of a high level overview of the three methods so at the top of the screen we have a column with the self-service feature then we have the three methods sneakernet dump and load and web services and you can see the the color coding kind of tries to represent the level of functionality that we've available with the various methods so you can see with a sneakernet approaches a lot of nodes it's just not possible or there's a lot of manual work that's required as you progress to the right-hand the center part of the screen the center column dump and load the process starts to increase as far as functionality but you can see that you're still faced with a lot of manual entries that have to take place on your back-office enterprise system and then as you get to the web services approach then a lot of things are possible and just about everything that is electronically automated and you can apply business rules to each one of the processes that we're talking about here okay I mentioned earlier the importance of determining your business rules and again I'm focused in delivery here but the same process would be recommended if you're offering other types of self-service functions from your website so the example here is what do you do if the customers not due for delivery real story I was visiting with a company in Baltimore back about ten years ago and I'm not offering web self-service and the president the company said John I will never take orders over the web and I said that's okay that's just a piece that you would not implement but I asked him why why wouldn't you accept orders over the web and he said well you know what happens is in October October 15th we get the first cold weather forecast every customer thinks they need in order so at least if they call we have an opportunity to talk to them and explain maybe based on our forecast system looks like you're not due for delivery well my answer was that's okay you don't have to take orders over the web but with the right implementation of self-service you in effect could duplicate that conversation with the customer by providing information from your website provide when they're estimated when they're due for delivery provide their in tank % or gallons or maybe you won't take the order ask them to contact the office possibly the other process in delivery what do you do with the customers on credit hold today if they're calling the office you have an opportunity to talk to them well obviously I would think if you're offering the payment capability off your website the first thing what you would do is promote the idea that they can make a payment if you're taking credit cards over your website that may be the easiest way for the customer to pay off an overdue balance or you may decide that this customer is repeatedly on hold repeatedly overdue and you need to have a more serious conversation with the customer through the mining of the data that decision could be made behind the scenes and if the customer has been overdue five times in the last year you may want to collect a security deposit from them before you make another delivery possibly well in that case you would have them contact the office and have to go through the process of ordering by talking to somebody in your office okay what I wanted to do here is kind of connect all of the various technologies that are possibly available to you in today's modern world and in effect this is showing the Amazon experience as it could be applied to a propane marketer in fact where a propane marketer is consumer and we're going to use the delivery order to cash as the example from the issuing of the order right through to collecting a payment in effect okay so we've got our consumer out there on the left-hand side the consumer wants to put an order in for 200 yards in our case in our particular case we have the three product which is our enterprise product we have a mobile solution called Raven which is a on board truck solution which is wirelessly enabled and it's a dispatch piece that in effect is sitting between the enterprise system in the mobile device so in this case the example is the customer wants to get on the web and place an order but in this example they're on credit hold and again in this example I'm using the real-time web services approach they're on credit hold the the consumer is notified of that we offer that allow them to use a credit card possibly to pay off the balance so they can proceed with their order we capture the credit card the web web developer validates the card you give an option possibly for the customer to store that card on going or recurring charges down the road the overdue balance is paid off we allow now the custom consumer to place the delivery order and maybe offer them an option to sign up for delivery notifications so now again we're modeling the Amazon model where the package delivery is being tracked through the process when they sign up they could sign up to get email or text or they would know the login for the website to get the status of their delivery going through the process now so that orders come in it came in through your enterprise system now dispatch is dealing with it the dispatcher assigns the order if the customer signed up for notification they could get a push notification or a text or possibly go to the portal to check the status of their delivery the delivery is made again to do this you would would require some sort of technology on your vehicle that is wireless so the messages are coming in real-time so in this case the delivery is made the customer could get notification again through the portal or via an email or a text message possibly and then last but not least when the credit card payment is applied to their account just like I get today when I pay my American Express bill I get an email to let me know that the payments been applied so in this
case either they would go to the portal to see that the payments been applied or get the push email or text so on a kit and again in effect that's the Amazon process turned into a propane marketers world and meeting the consumer expectations will be certain consumers okay some recommendations we highly recommend if you're going to implement web self-service that you hire a web / application developer not a web designer we believe there's a difference a web designer may be able to put together a very pretty website but if they're not an application developer they may not possess the technical expertise to truly offer a full service portal they should that the company you hire should have marketing talent so they can put together a very good user experience on the web and we think as important as anything I believe you should look be looking to hire people with industry experience your propane marketers that's what you do that's your expertise what better thing to marry a web developer with a back office product with a propane marketer I think you wind up with a better product by partnering and we happen to deal with a couple of companies in the country that's one and prime media we've got a lot of experience with them and they have a fair amount of experience within the market overall so in other words they're not just doing website development just for ad systems customers they would be a anxious to talk to you I'm sure for other back office systems we also highly recommend you take a phased approach if you know if you're not offering self-service today again crawl before you walk before you run the most fundamental self-service that we would suggest is let the customer look at their transaction history check their balance and let them make payments over the web it's really important to define your business rules because again you're taking but you're taking processes that are typically been dealt with customer one-on-one with the CSR and now you extending that process over the web so it's really important that you think through what your business process is in the office and probably howdy how do you extend that over the web and that would be working with your web developer and possibly your back-office vendor to help you through that conversation it's really important that you promote your website you know is if you're going to spend some dollars here to develop it it's important that you try to get as many customers signed up as possible and it's also important that you measure the results that maybe maybe you have to tweak the process of taking a payment maybe you have to tweak the process of taking orders over the web because you what you're not getting the activity that you thought you were going to get you can offer loyalty programs or offer so if they sign up they get maybe a discount on the next delivery those types of things to try to get as many people that want to going through the self-service portal now again this is not to say that you no longer have CSRs and we offers answering phones the approach here is satisfies the consumer that wants the self-service option and continue to offer excellent service via the phone and actually if you can for the people at one self-service over the web if they have the tasks you likely have the ability to offer a more effective service to the people that want to call you and some that's really important today if you're hiring a web developer it's really important that they're not only developing a portal that is accessible and usable through a desktop system but today people using their tablet and more importantly they're using their smartphone more and more to do web self-service so it's important that the user interface that's developed is transportable across the the technology platform that consumers are using today okay a little bit of a round-the-world tour of our core products mention ad energy III that's our core back-office slash enterprise system that runs the many companies that I referenced earlier in the in the early in the presentation Raven is our onboard truck computer rachie we were one of the pioneers in onboard truck computing the Raven product through multiple multiple generations it started back in 1995 and there we have over six thousand mobile devices deployed today in North America on delivery trucks we have a product called Pegasus which is our counterpart in Field Service and that's an area that we're seeing an increased level of activity in the propane market Pegasus historically was a product run by our heating oil companies but more the propane marketers are looking deployed technology in the service world we have a business intelligent product called Atlas that pushes management reports to the appropriate people in your organization smart cacti reference that's our suite of web services that allow a very interactive web experience to your consumer and for the folks that may be on the phone that are in the community store market we actually have a full-blown community offering both from the home office perspective and an in-store perspective and a little bit of name-dropping here these are some example of our clients each one of these companies actually are utilizing the smart connect product and offering some level of self service over their websites now you may look at this slide and say well those are a lot of big companies and I'm a I'm a smaller marketer you're maybe I sell a million or two million gallons a year and propane it's actually interesting we actually do support 11 out of the top 30 propane marketers in the country they have our various technologies deployed but if I look at the sales activity that we've had just in the last month and a half or so we have signed a number of propane marketers that sell between 1 and 2 million gallons a year and we've actually recently signed another one of the top 15 propane markers in the country so again if you're a smaller marketer and you're looking to grow your business or looking to offer felt self service we would likely have some offerings that you may be interested at at some point in time right I'm going to turn it back to you I said I think we're ready for some Q&A possibly yes thanks John a lot of good information here we have collected some questions go through the list a number of companies have asked I already have a website well I have to start all over to add self-service yeah it's a great question actually and that was one of the more common questions that I think was asked her in the registration process but I also reached out to some of our development partners the portal developers and they said the same thing that that question is a very common question and the answer is no the technology we're talking about would be able to be plugged into an existing website the only caution I would say there is that you need to take a look at your looking feel of your current website you know there has to be a good user experience when they come on the web and if you've developed your website you know five ten years ago and you haven't spent some looked at it from a marketing eye perspective you may want to take a look at a refresh from marketing perspective but the answer is no from a technology perspective the self-service portal people can in effect edit tab to keep it simple here at a tab on your current website with a customer can log in when when the user clicks on that tab in effect reaches out via web services typically to the portal application and then from that point on the user would be living in the in the portal application and then they could provide a seamless way to come back to your existing website so the answer is no don't don't let that be a per bidding factor to consider offering a self-service another one here do you also offer HVAC online capabilities such as allowing a customer to schedule service or a tune-up yeah we do and I read this correctly this is a question specifically around my product offering and the answer is yes we positively do and it's actually interesting is that if you're going to schedule service work orders over the web it's important to consider how you're going to do that first of all and what your back office system capability is and this is probably one of the clear examples of the bennet event of using a web services approach those example in our back-office system if your csr scheduling a work order we have the ability to determine what the type of work order it is determined who's available what technicians are available based on their skill set we have the ability to try to drive the appointment based on the existing appointments in that geographic area already so rather than just taking orders and having to deal with the inefficient nature of that that type of interface in effect could be exposed to the consumer over the web they wouldn't even know it necessarily but behind the scenes the software could be making the judgment okay they need this type of work order this is the technicians available and oh by the way we already have a service called booked in that geographic area so why don't we present these appointment options to the consumer over the web without that real-time web service capability scheduling service calls could be a bit problematic and may not actually be very effective taking just work water request over the web sure you can do that but then you still faced with having to make that phone call back to the back of the customer can you give a customer too much information that's a great question actually you know using I'll just use my product offerings example the smart connect product in effect and it could expose almost any piece of data that's on that customer record could be exposed over the web and we certainly don't recommend that there's certain data that existed that exists in your back office system that you would not want to expose to the customer I think a great approach would be is to look at maybe the 10 or 20 or so most common questions you get at your call center the people that answer phones and make a determination out of those 10 or 20 and it may not be that many maybe there's only five in your world but look at the type of information that you typically talk to the customer about during those exchanges over the phone and then make a determination do you want to present that data over the web to the customer I think that's a that's a good approach these implementations should be very much focused on the process look at the process that takes place in the home office today and decide how am I going to extend that over the web or from a data perspective what am i presenting to the customer but again not to beat a dead horse but the business rules what business rules do you want to apply to that process if the customer sitting out at ten o'clock at night there's nobody in your office but they're engaging with your customer so that and that's a really important theme here they're engaging with your business over the web unattended so you have to think it through can you sink payments made on the web portal to our back office system with no human interaction yeah let me answer this one first for my product perspective but I'll give you the marketplace answer also I think the answer is yes through our product this marketing product whether it's a one-time payment one-time check possibly that's being processed or a credit card payment or a EFT possibly where the customer wants arranged to be drafted on a recurring basis all that is doable through our smart Connect process if if your current vendor does not have web services available one potential is they may have some ability some API to import payments maybe they have a lockbox interface so the web developer who was in effect processing the payment over the lab could possibly feed some sort of other API that your current back-office system may offer potentially another one here is a measure for retention with fully automate automated customers versus classic customer types yeah I found that this is one of the more interesting questions I had found actually I have to be honest I don't have any exact statistics but I have some industry kind of background to it many years ago I attended a focus group that one of our larger customers had arranged they hired a consulting company to bring custard consumers in and they had different panels of consumers and one of the panels was a younger profile and the other panel was 50-somethings and it was fascinating to see the difference in the attitude towards a full-service marketer the older folks the people in the 50s wanted to deal with the full-service marketer the younger folks were more likely to shop okay I actually think there is a difference obviously in retention between the propane marketer and AHIMA marketer because I think there are companies on the phone today that probably do both but in the propane business if you're providing the tank obviously you have a much stickier customer there right if you're in the email business it's more it's much more easier for those consumers to shop possibly but my message today would be if you're not offering cell service you're not getting the customer in the first place so the whole conversation of retention may not even take place because they're not signing up to get that product from you they're going to somebody else that has a web self-service presence and they look upon that as a more modern company so I don't have statistics some of our web portal developers may have or maybe this information from MGP a potentially but that's kind of my industry answer to the question another one how do I increase customer enrollment in participation with the web portal yeah another great question my notes here is promote promote promote certainly if you're going to spend some - you're going to spend some dollars to do this obviously you're going to spend time also to try to make the decisions that have to be made to implement self-service it's really important that you have a plan beyond just putting the web portal out there so you know promote it stuffers and billing billing documents people know maybe offer incentives if they sign up a number of our portal partners promote the idea of loyalty programs so they if they come to the website they get some points that can be used for something else down the road maybe a purchase of one of your products or some other product possibly it's really important that you promote it now on average I think you know one of the initial goals should be 10 to 20 percent of your client base to at least get them to register but it's important you know they may register but if they're not using the portal you need to find out why varies so that that's part of that gauging the success of the project you need to continue to evaluate what are people doing on the web what can we do better what can we offer some additional sentence but definitely you need to promote it otherwise you could spend some time and effort here and not get the results that you should be getting today in today's marketplace you have you must have consumers that would like to be with you all over the web kind of touched on this a little bit John but another one can I use my web portal to attract new customers yeah I would say positively you know at a base level if you were before talking sneakernet now where we got the fundamental way of doing you know self service over the web at minimum I would have a form on my website where a prospect could fill it out so at minimum you need to get the email you know if you don't want to rely on that that that consumer to have to call you to say I want to become a customer because they may not pick up the phone and call you at least at minimum have a forum the ideal world would be have some ability to have that lead come in to a back office system and it have a process in place where that lead can be delivered electronically to whether the appropriate person in the organization to follow up that's the real you know the ideal world but positively if you're going to build a website and offer any level of self service actually even you're not going to offer self service obvious obviously I would promote the idea of having some method for the customer to say I would like to be
a customer summers have questions on how to use the portal can one of our CSRs log in and see what the customer is seeing or login to make a change on behalf of the customer without using the customers personal username and password yeah definitely uh I actually ran this question by a couple of our partners just to confirm in the partners that we deal with all said yes that the your people in the office would have the ability to log in through the portal access the account look at the same information from a portal perspective that the consumer is looking at in our world if we're talking about the smart connect being in play with our real-time web services the data is the data so there's we don't there's no replication of the data so if the data gets changed in the portal it gets changed instantaneously in effect in the enterprise database or if the data is being changed through one of our normal back office components the data would be changed at the same time so yes there is a there is the ability to support the customer that may not be 100% comfortable with the portal and for you to look at the same information in the same format that your consumer is looking at over the web how can I provide a secure customer portal I'm concerned about security yeah it's really important you know I'm not an expert in propane right so it's important that if I had somebody come in and work on my propane system that I hire an expert so it's I think it's really important because this is a very important question that you partner with the right company that can address the the concerns that you would have regarding Network and security in today's world it's very critical that the right pieces get put in place to protect your business you protect your business all kinds of ways of protecting your business from a data perspective is definitely important those problems can be addressed there's technical ways of protecting your information there's something called the DMZ where you can restrict who has access you know only only certain people with certain credentials can access through the portal the so I would highly recommend and that you should be talking to both your portal developer about these considerations and then also your back-office vendor should be involved in those conversations to make sure that you feel comfortable that your business is protected through any kind of intrusion that could take place John just a question that I have can you give us a sense just you know from your perspective on where you think the propane industry is today as a relates to technology you know you kind of feel like that acceptance of new technology is taking place out there yeah definitely Brian actually from a portal perspective if I look at our using our smart connect products the example I think the level activity on that side of a business I would say over the last just the last several years is probably up by 25 to 30 percent on the mobile side mobile computing definitely is there's a much larger penetration and actually the move has been from on the MOL side people move from non wireless devices on the vehicles to wireless and I think what's reflecting there is that there's a move in the marketplace a lot of consumers want to go on real call delivery so the need for maybe wireless communication is greater today on the marketer than it was in the past so they're willing to look at the the additional expense possibly to put a wireless connection out to the vehicle and then on the server side companies more and more looking and see how they drive revenue and how they diversify so more more companies are getting involved in true service so I think in the propane market rather than just doing tank sets more more companies and maybe you're doing full-blown HVAC and to do a lot of those things you need technology and the last piece probably and this is probably the most apparent one is the whole idea of routing trucks putting the deliveries in a sequence that you tell the driver to deliver man we've been supporting that technology I think for at least 15 years but in the last three to five years the adoption rate on that technology has gone through the roof and it can be quite honest the technology hasn't improved really it's what's available today really was would have been available 10 or 15 years ago but the markets more accepting of it and I think what may be happening there is the changeover on the drivers is taking place but the driver that's been with us 35 or 40 years is retiring and the new guy that with a new Gallants driving that propane truck doesn't know the route as well so why not apply technology the problem rather than making inefficient deliveries and just you know when you're out and about in the industry going to shows you know what's that consistent message your concern you know what are those conversations like that you hear the most I guess from the industry from the retailer yeah like well you know it's interesting if you ask me that question a few years ago would have been the price of product the good news I think in the last year or two the price of product is it's come down from a technology perspective I think in a little bit of a flavor of this and some of the Q&A that we got it's a little bit of a concern that we're not technical people we're propane marketers and and sometimes I think there's a bit of a paralysis in moving forward with with technology because of that concern I think over the years there have been some technology failures you know as technology providers sometimes don't only do the best job and people get a little skittish and making that decision it's it's a that I think that's the biggest thing we're not propane marketers I'm not sure how to go about doing this and I think it's really important that you pick the right partners that's what it comes down to you know pick the right partner they should be able to give you comfort level and move forward and always I always also recommend crawl before you walk before you run and just kind of going back to the web portals and everything you addressed today you know what kind of timetable are we looking at for the retailer who's interested in something like this what kind of timetable for them to get something like this up and running yeah it's a good question actually I actually had this conversation with a couple of our partners actually try to get a sense of you know what their timelines are and it would somewhat depend on this scope of the the self service offering obviously I think if you're if you go into the the the middle level of some of the functionality was talking about you're probably looking at four to six months from start to finish doesn't mean somebody's on the clock you know for that period of time it just takes time to get the right pieces in place work through the process and how you want to with your business rules those types of things if you're talking about simply taking payments and looking at balances over the web I think you could you could certainly tighten up that time frame and probably get it done in maybe as a three month time frame but again we don't want anybody walking away saying my god i'm paying somebody for six months worth of time and effort if that's not the case it just takes some time to get some of these things implanted is what it comes down to john i think that's all we have for now we really appreciate you joining us today you had mentioned before about if anyone wants to reach out to you with additional questions do you want to give that give them that information yep there's my contact information you can reach me directly at the 800 number or if you want to just simply drop me an email I'll respond as quick as possible my intent is that if anybody submitted questions that we did not answer today my intention would be olynyk's several days or so to respond back to each person if there was a question I don't think we addressed on on the call today I just want to again personally thank LP guest magazine and Brian for offering the platform here and I hope everybody got something out it is something out of today thank you John and one closing note here and sticking with our technology theme LP gas magazine in 2017 will launch a retailer technology column series will have six retail companies each write a column about a technology that's been useful to their operations currently seeking those companies interested in sharing their experiences you are interested in writing one of these columns please contact me I'm at two one six seven zero six three seven four eight or B Richardson at North Coast media that night thank you right and thank you both and thank thank you to everyone for attending today's webinar and sponsored by ad systems if you have any more questions do not hesitate to contact our presenters at the emails on your screen now links to their email addresses are in the bios of the love you can also download a PDF of today's presentation as well as other documents from the resources box on the left-hand side of your screen and on-demand recording of today's webinar will be emailed to you tomorrow afternoon and will be available online for a full year at LPS magazine.com slash webinars if you'd like to share this webinar with your colleagues you can do so via any the links on the left-hand side of your screen thank you again for attending today's webinar we look forward to seeing you at a future webinar
