Portal to improve customer collaboration

Lamb Weston

Challenges

Lamb Weston is a world-leading brand in high quality frozen potato products, sold in over 100 countries. Its mission is to be a real partner to its customers. A partner who goes beyond the role of mere supplier. To reinforce this mission, the partnership concept has become an essential part of the brand, with Lamb Weston promising its customers to be “Your Partner in Potatoes”. Innovation, where convenience, efficiency and 24/7 digital business are central, was the logical step to further support customers. To achieve this, Lamb Weston joined forces with IT professional, Harborn, laying the foundation for the creation of the portal.

Technologies

AWS
Serverless programming
CDN (Content Delivery Network)
VueJS
Sulu

Partnerships

Hubspot

Lamb Weston about the customer portal

Process optimisation by working more efficiently

Currently, Lamb Weston receives dozens of orders every day in an unstructured format. For example, by e-mail, or an Excel form. In order to process these properly, they are manually transferred to the order system, which takes a lot of time and is prone to errors. In addition, many restaurant owners and chefs order their Lamb Weston fries through a wholesaler. As a result, there’s a distance between supplier and buyer. This called for a smart solution that not only offers advantages for Lamb Weston, but also their customers. The idea for the new customer portal was born.

Mobile phone which displays the Lamb Weston Customer Portal

The customer portal as a partnership tool

The customer portal is a personal, closed platform within the Lamb Weston corporate website for, among others, purchasing organisations and wholesalers. The whole assortment can be found on this platform, and orders can be placed immediately. The customer also gains insight into their invoices and personal data history and can contact Customer Care directly. This is the perfect way of shifting the focus from processing orders to service and advice. Exactly as it should be for “Your Partner in Potatoes”. Does a customer want to buy directly from the wholesaler? Then the portal can be used to find out more about specific products or the services Lamb Weston offers.

New business opportunities with menu engineering

Customers can also use the menu-engineering tool on this platform. Within this calculation tool, a catering entrepreneur or chef can provide insight into the turnover, effectiveness and new opportunities for their current dishes. What makes this unique is that, in addition to concrete guidelines, Lamb Weston also share tips from other chefs, so that customers get more return on their menu. This is how the company creates new business opportunities for all their customers, whatever their needs.

Investing in great customer experiences

Thanks to the smart design of the portal, Lamb Weston can, for example, invite a select group to test a new product. Share recipes or bring a certain product to the attention of specific catering entrepreneurs and chefs, who are (often unconsciously) interested in this. Providing exactly what the customer is looking for will therefore become much easier with this portal. It will lead to mutual trust and great customer experiences.

Thanks to the interaction within the customer portal, Lamb Weston knows exactly what’s going on in the market. Which means they can immediately adjust their product range, services and advice accordingly. It also offers the opportunity to really enter into a dialogue in a safe environment. The perfect basis for a stable collaboration.

The future is all about collaboration

Lamb Weston's desire for long-lasting partnerships doesn’t only apply to (potential) customers. In an earlier stage, Harborn had already successfully developed the entire corporate website for Lamb Weston. Making us the logical choice as partner, for the realisation of the customer portal. Here too, both parties opted for a durable solution: Harborn based the new portal on AWS Cloud services, which are linked to SAP.

The speed and scalability of AWS will really help Lamb Weston over the coming years. Especially with the roll-out and expansion of the platform, for example, by optimising the functionality and expanding to other target audiences. Additional applications and platforms can also be developed from AWS, to complement the current customer portal. This provides even more possibilities for the future.

The MVP/basic version of the customer portal was realised within three months and scored 9.5 on a scale of 10, in the first user test. An excellent result that could only be realised due to the excellent cooperation between the IT specialists of Harborn and the food specialists of Lamb Weston.

As you would expect from a good partnership, everything was done through the customer portal, to offer wholesalers, restaurant owners and Lamb Weston more time to focus on the opportunities in the food service sector. Because by growing together, you achieve more.

200+

Customers connected in 6 months

Robert

Delivery Manager

Would you like to know more about the ingredients of this case?

Are you ready to cook up your own online platform? Would you like to learn more about our digital services? Give us a call or send an email.

31 10 436 50 50 robert.revet@harborn.com