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Distinctive Designs International, Inc.
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It's nice to have a company that is so responsive.
Phylis of Distinctive Designs International
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Company Profile
Distinctive Designs, a leading manufacturer of permanent florals and botanicals, was locked into a bad business relationship with an unresponsive web provider. They needed a comprehensive business-to-business ordering system that would streamline their online initiative and give them complete control over their inventory and customer data.
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Solutions & Benefits
When Distinctive Designs met Addison in August of 2002, they were maintaining a large web site, including a password-protected online catalog which published information on thousands of products and supported business to business ordering. One of their primary complaints was that entering a new product into the system required data entry in no less than three areas and involved hand-creation of an HTML page. A second major complaint was that Distinctive had no direct control over customer logins, and the web firm that managed the site had poor response time to all of their requests.
We first analyzed the web traffic patterns and application hosting needs of DistinctiveDesigns.com and realized that we could provide an equivalent hosting package for thousands of dollars less per year than the company was currently paying. After taking over hosting of their site, we began designing a new, comprehensive inventory management, online ordering, and customer database system built completely to their specifications. The system automates the process of validating and authorizing access for new business customers, provides more powerful inventory search capabilities, and remembers all customer information—including contact data, shipping preferences, and internal account information—enabling business customers to finalize orders with just a few clicks.
Several months after launching the new system, based on feedback from customers and analysis of how people were using the system, we developed a 5 phase plan for making major enhancements to the system over a 6 month period. These enhancements added many product options and improved the category structure of the online inventory to reflect product relationships unique to Distinctive Designs’ industry. The final phase of this plan gave online customers the ability to drag-and-drop product photos right on their screen, allowing them to visually ‘match-up’ floor plants and trees with compatible planters.
Around that same time, Distinctive Designs encountered emergency problems with their in-house email server. Addison immediately setup temporary email accounts on our shared email servers and redirected all mail traffic for the company through our network. Distinctive was so pleased with the web access and spam filtering capabilities of our email service that they decided to scrap their in-house server and have Addison host all of their corporate email. Unsolicited bulk email used to be a major headache for Distinctive Designs: we estimate that our spam filtering option now saves them over 150 hours of employee productivity per year.
After providing DDI with years of maintenance and consultation, they came to us to redesign their web site, utilizing our unique site planning process, the end result was the quality site they have today.
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