We continue our conversation with Alexey Nesterenko from FB Group that deployed a business automation system for the retail trade company that sells mobile devices across its network of shops and warehouses. Although most of the cases and approaches described in this series of articles can be easily adopted in other areas of business related to the sale of goods and customer service.

In the first article of the series, we talked about how the customer's warehouse management was automated. But the work with the customer did not end there, and the project developed further. Let's see what other steps have been done to automate routine processes and increase sales.

Step #2: Let’s Check the Prices of Your Competitors

— Alexey, it was a rather big implementation project — what other processes were automated?

Yes, our project went through several stages. And one of the challenges was to monitor prices of competitors and then enter and process the results — all automatically, of course. 

We set up a module in our system that:

• Monitored the required competitors on the Internet

• Covered marketplaces

• Partially accessed their websites

After that, we implemented an automated comparison of competitors' products with our catalog, and we could see the competitors' prices every day in real time. 

This setup allowed our customer to:

• Monitor the entire region

• Identify where prices needed to be reduced

• Determine where prices could be increased

Ultimately, it led to a better understanding of their pricing policy.

— Did it look like a comparative table?

The 1C system has the ability to run a browser inside it. We opened the necessary websites in this window:

• The website of the customer

• The website of a competitor

If a competitor had a catalog on the marketplace, we filtered and viewed it, too. 

When loading current prices from websites, the system also received basic product information, such as:

• The name of the seller

• The name of the product

• The product ID, etc.

Next, we compared different catalogs and products in them so that the system could determine matches across different platforms. For example:

• Competitor's Catalog: Product ID 565

• Internal System: Matches our product ID 56528

• External Website: Another unique ID

When we linked all product IDs from external systems to item records in ours we got the right bindings to match our products with external products.

Results and Analysis

After that, it was enough just to download the prices for these products. The result of the price comparison was presented in the form of a special report that showed the whole picture of what was happening with the prices. 

Key Benefit: we could automatically find out if some kind of promotion was taking place, it was possible to understand immediately that competitors lowered prices for a certain brand. You can always notice that by looking at the prices.

— And you were able to implement this functionality in the 1C system?

Without questions. We can do this with any 1C product. I think that functionality can be referred to as parsing competitors' prices. Another cool thing we did was to implement a non-standard approach to online trading for our client.

How It Worked

We had a website on Bitrix and the 1C system. Here’s a breakdown of the process:

1. Initial Sale:

• Let’s imagine that today we sold you a mobile phone.

• You provided your number to receive a discount.

2. Customer Tracking:

• The system searches for you across various social networks, for example, in Telegram.

• It continuously attempts to locate you on the Internet.

3. Communication:

• To contact you via Telegram, we created our own Telegram client that sends messages from the system, simulating human interaction rather than a bot.

• If the system cannot find you anywhere, it sends a TEXT message to your phone asking for feedback and providing a link.

4. Feedback Process:

• By opening the link, you can see the person who assisted you at the store yesterday, complete with a photo and name.

• You can leave feedback on his/her work.

Follow-Up Offers

• Day After Purchase:

• You will receive a message offering to buy, for example, a case for your new phone.

• The system selects a suitable case from the top 3 sales for your specific color and model.

• Backend Operations:

• The system generates a unique lead page to be displayed to the client through a link.

• Subsequent Offers:

• On the 3rd day, a message will offer to insure your purchase at a discount.

• In 3 months, you will receive an offer to change the glass.

• In 6 months, an offer to upgrade.

• In 1 year, you’ll get news about a new model release with a pre-order option.

That is, we implemented a sort of BI analytics module that was able to operate with different scenarios depending on what happened on the day of the purchase and what the client bought later. 

The client base consisted of hundreds of thousands of people. The communication channel with each client was always selected automatically.

• If you left Telegram, we would find you on WhatsApp.

• 1C was the leading system, while Bitrix acted as an intermediary tool.

— Many companies have not yet reached this level of customer service.

In this project, we were very lucky with the customer, the business owner. He has vast business experience and preferred to invest in automation to free up time for other important tasks. It is clear that when 80% of all sales processes are automated — all that follows is improvement. We conducted interviews in different countries, and some business owners say that they are satisfied with everything as it is, they do not want to make an effort… to invest. 

A significant part of success in any automation project is the high motivation of the owner who understands:

• Why this is needed

• Why automation is necessary

Process automation described in this story was based on the low-code 1C:Enterprise platform that allows building business solutions fast and with minimum development effort. Learn more here.