The challenge
Verrick distributed industrial fasteners and fixings to around 4,000 trade accounts. Every reorder, order status check and spec sheet request came in by phone or email, handled by a twelve-person customer service team who were, functionally, a human API over an ERP nobody else could see. Leadership framed it as a staffing problem and had been quoting for two additional hires. The actual problem was that customers had no way to serve themselves, and the busiest ones — placing several orders a week — were the most inconvenienced by that.
What we did
Watched the calls before designing anything
Two days listening to customer service revealed that roughly 70% of contacts were three requests: where is my order, what did I order last time, and send me the spec sheet. That's a product scope, and it's much narrower than the portal leadership had imagined.
Built the narrow thing first
Order status, order history with one-click reorder, and searchable spec sheets. We deliberately shipped without the quoting, returns and account management features on the original wish list, because none of them appeared in the call data.
Designed for a phone in a van
The primary user is a site foreman ordering between jobs, not someone at a desk. Large touch targets, works on poor signal, and reorder reachable in two taps from opening the app.
Drove adoption through the people being replaced
Customer service introduced the portal on the calls they were already taking — 'I can show you how to check that yourself next time'. Adoption reached 72% of active accounts, which no email campaign would have achieved.
The result
Inbound support contacts fell 61% and reorder frequency rose 38%, because reordering stopped requiring a phone call during business hours. Nobody was made redundant — the customer service team moved onto proactive account work, which is what produced the reorder increase.
“We asked them to scope a portal with about forty features. They came back and said seventy percent of our call volume was three things, and we should build those and nothing else. I pushed back hard. They were right, and we shipped in ten weeks instead of a year.”