Ever heard the phrase “chain of pain?” If you’re a wholesale distributor, chances are you’ve experienced it via the cascading agony of outdated workflows or missed sales opportunities. Pierre Barbeau, co-founder and CEO of Moblico, returns to chat with Jason about his company’s supercharged mobile technology solution to common pain points, including proprietary innovations such as unified business messaging automation, broadcast engagement strategies, and OrderAssist AI™, Moblico’s advanced tool for converting unstructured orders into fast, accurate sales.
“There are a lot of chains of pain in how things are done,” says Pierre, specifically, the avenues by which customer service reps, branch managers, and outside salespeople connect with customers. The communication options aren’t limited to text, talk, chat, or email. Customers have increasingly resorted to sending images instead of completing a purchase order or dragging items into a website shopping cart. “That’s led to an increase in these unstructured orders that are being received by a team inbox,” Pierre explains, adding, “In the absence of a tool to translate that information into something that’s more easily ingested into an ordering system, it’s all done manually.”
Manual data entry costs wholesale distributors time and money. “if you can reduce that burden,” Pierre asserts, “you’re freeing up the team to do the things that they do best.” Moblico’s suite of mobile tools simplifies customer communication, reduces transaction errors, and empowers team members to focus on more profitable endeavors––goals that have informed Moblico’s purpose since it was founded in 2010. “We came from the mobile industry and had a sense of what resources, what tools this business sector would need as things were beginning to open up,” says Pierre. “What I think is unique about what we’re doing and have since our inception is we have a messaging component and a marketing component in our system, and what we’ve done is added the order assist as a function as part of the flow.”
Moblico’s genius lies in how it has leveraged complex mobile tech to automate workflows, simplify order processing, and strengthen customer relationships via a tool that most of us are already comfortable using: our phone.
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QUOTES
“We’re hyper-focused on our customer.”
“I think distributors are very aware they need to step up their game in terms of technology and digital terms, transformation, and data cleanliness, all that good stuff. I wouldn’t say everybody’s on the same footing, but I think the awareness is sky-high, and things like AI only added fuel to the fire.”
“We call our product Order Assist AI because we’re trying to apply AI in such a way that it helps the team do their work. We’re not trying to get AI to interface directly with the customer.”
“We’re really trying to keep that one-to-one relationship intact and apply AI in such a way that it, again, removes those painful steps in your day-to-day business.”
“I strongly believe that processing your orders in an automated fashion is going to be like having an email address. Everybody’s gonna have it, do it, and if you don’t, you’re gonna be wasting a lot of valuable time.”
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Distribution Talk is produced by The Distribution Team, a consulting services firm dedicated to helping wholesale distribution clients remove barriers to profitability, generate wealth, and achieve personal goals.
This episode was edited by The Creative Impostor Studios Special thanks to our sponsors for this episode: Moblico, helping businesses do more business on mobile devices; and INxSQL Distribution Software, an integrated
