As we’ve explained elsewhere, we’ve been hard at work on the new Corevist Platform — our all-new flagship product that offers an advanced UI, deep personalization and architecture that’s built for integrations. 

Every aspect of the new Corevist Platform was developed in conversation with our clients. But there’s one feature that deserves special attention: The way we collaborated with a client to develop Corevist BuyBot. 

Here’s the story in a nutshell (and what it means for our clients). 

Problem: Some manufacturers’ customers will always place orders via email

While B2B eCommerce has come to dominate manufacturers’ order-to-cash cycles, the reality is that not every customer will stop placing email orders. Manufacturers’ customers may have legacy processes in place that require email order placement — or company culture at customer organizations may resist change.

Obviously, manufacturers need to take orders in the way that customers want to place orders.

But here’s the problem: At scale, manual processing of email orders drives up your cost to serve. You need a team of CSRs (customer service reps) checking each order for errors, typing it into SAP if it’s 100% perfect, and reaching out to customers to correct any errors.

For some manufacturers, email orders are a big problem.

Our solution: Build Corevist BuyBot to route email orders appropriately

As we listened to our clients’ pain with email orders, we began to imagine a solution. What if we empowered our clients to accept error-free email orders without human intervention?

The perfect automated solution would do things like these.  

• Reading PDF orders attached to emails.
• Checking the order against our client’s SAP business rules, using the same SAP integration architecture as the Corevist shopping cart.
• Posting the order to SAP automatically if there are no errors.
• Sending the order to Customer Service for review if there are errors.

Our process: Iterative client collaboration

We worked with one client in particular to develop this solution. We met with our client daily, editing and mapping their customers’ PDF orders to understand the requirements. This gave us deep visibility into the scope of the project.

To test our assumptions on real orders, we launched a pilot and onboarded just one of our client’s customers. As “Baby BuyBot” processed incoming orders, we met with the client several times a week to figure out what was working (and what wasn’t).

Once everyone was happy with the pilot, we started looking at how to scale it. We tackled issues like deployment, differences between various customers’ PDF order outputs, and how to make Corevist BuyBot foolproof.

Essential component: Structured plan for controlled failure

Since “Baby BuyBot” was processing real orders from real customers, we had to cover all the bases in case of order failure. The team created a plan to spot orders that didn’t process as expected. With some manual work, we handled these orders on behalf of our client, ensuring those orders didn’t fall through the cracks.

The result: Corevist BuyBot extension (available in the new Corevist Platform)

We’re proud to announce that Corevist BuyBot is now available as an extension in the new Corevist Platform.

This is a huge achievement for our team, and we’re thrilled to make it available.

As intended, Corevist BuyBot reads PDF orders attached to emails and checks the order against your SAP business rules through your Corevist infrastructure. If the order is well-formed (i.e. doesn’t contain errors), BuyBot posts it to SAP automatically.

If the order contains errors, BuyBot sends the original PDF order to your CSR team for review. This means your CSRs only deal with problem orders, while BuyBot posts error-free orders to SAP without human intervention.

How to take advantage of Corevist BuyBot

• If you’re already a client, talk to your PM about the new Corevist Platform and what it would mean at your organization.
• If you’re currently talking to our sales team, ask your rep about adding Corevist BuyBot to your solution.
• If you haven’t yet reached out to sales, please do. They would love to explore how BuyBot could impact your organization.