Posted by Lisa Schwarz, Director, Ecommerce Marketing
Health-conscious people turn to Juvenon for anti-aging nutritional supplements designed to maintain vigor and extend a high-quality life, but the company’s own aging order management system needed a boost of its own.
Founded in 2002, Juvenon’s patented products are based on proprietary technology developed at the University of California at Berkeley by Dr. Bruce Ames, winner of the U.S. National Science Prize, and Nathan Hamilton and are especially popular among people older than 50. Juvenon’s internet retail business is a natural fit for subscription programs that enable customers to receive scheduled replenishment of products.
The order management software used by Juvenon, however, was ill suited for continuity programs. It was inflexibile and manual work requirements held back the subscription model. In addition, Juvenon lacked direct control over order management. It relied on a heavily customized system based on Mail Order Manager that was being run by a third-party fulfillment house.
When its fulfillment partner suffered financial problems, the Incline Village, Nev.-based company began looking for its own order management software. Juvenon wanted to bring new control, visibility and efficiency to how it managed orders coming from www.juvenon.com, its call center and direct mail.
‘Total Control’ over Order Processing NetSuite OMX proved to be the ideal solution. Juvenon went live in the summer of 2012 with the Software-as-a-Service solution and it has made order management faster and more efficient, and provided new flexibility in running profitable continuity programs used by roughly half the customer base.
With NetSuite, Juvenon has been able to offer customers online self-service capabilities to set up and manage the products continuity program and shipping schedules. That’s reduced cancellation rates and helped the company expand continuity participation from about 40 percent of customers to 50 percent.
“We have total control over when and how orders are pushed out and how customer issues are resolved,” said Hamilton, Juvenon President. “NetSuite OMX lets our operations people see where every order is at any time. It’s very transparent and the whole order flow is made clear to anyone using the system.”
Additionally, CRM capabilities give call center representatives a single view of customer information and orders to speed issue resolution and improve satisfaction. Returns processing has been significantly improved over the “nightmare” of the previous system, which usually meant emails back and forth, delays and frustration, according to Hamilton.
Past problems with large order spikes have been eliminated. Now Juvenon can scale order management to handle peak loads of 20,000 orders a week, often in January when consumers undertake health and exercise programs, or in response to Juvenon advertising campaigns.
“That’s a huge advantage of NetSuite in scaling to peak order demands,” Hamilton said. “As a cloud solution, NetSuite lets us focus on marketing and building the business rather than worry about managing the IT infrastructure.”