PALMER GAS & OIL
Services we provide:
- Discovery
- Strategy
- UI/UX Design
- Custom Integration
- Technical Assessment
- Custom Development
- Customer Portal Design
ABOUT PALMER GAS & OIL
Palmer Gas and Oil started in the early 1900’s as a country store in North Salem, NH owned by William Palmer. The store offered customers everything they could need from milk to mail. In the late 1940s, Palmer started including bottles of gas in his store’s offerings for neighbors and friends. Around the same time (1932), Palmer’s son-in-law, Charles Ermer, started a kerosene and fuel oil business in the Salem area. Eventually, the two businesses merged and in 1981 Palmer Gas/Ermer Oil was formed. Over 90 years later with both propane and fuel oil, Palmer Gas & Oil is still making people smile. The simple fuel delivery and service programs along with easy billing and maintenance plans keep customers comfortable year-round.
OUR APPROACH
Palmer Gas & Oil came to SilverTech looking for a long-term sustainable solution for its customer and administration web portals. Palmer wanted the new portal to be more user-friendly and improve the overall customer experience. The old “My Account” portal was outdated and a bit cumbersome to use. Palmer Gas & Oil employees could not make content updates to the portal and relied on their vendor for any and all changes.
Changes were expensive and error prone. Palmer Gas & Oil also wanted to leverage features like personalization to target certain messages and show/hide features depending on programs customers are enrolled in.
The new web portal would need to be designed for the user to have a friction-free experience, promoting customer self-service, easy to navigate, technically sound.SilverTech begins any project with the discovery phase. In Discovery, SilverTech’s strategy and technical experts worked closely with Palmer Gas & Oil stakeholders to understand and further develop the business goals, website goals, business drivers, technology requirements, sure analytics, success criteria and more to identify how the new portal should function. The new portal needed to reflect the Palmer values of safety, excellence, integrity, teamwork, community, and fun.
GOALS
- Processing payments
- Reconciling online payments
- Running credit reports for new customers
- Setting and managing Oil and Propane contract pricing
- Creating Pricing and Budget Contracts
- Mailing out contracts
- Reviewing reports on gallons sold and average prices.
- Managing customer rewards
SUCCESS CRITERIA FOR NEW PORTAL
- Interactive customer-facing portal requirements
- New customer online enrollment form
- Price protection portal
- Palmer Points portal
- Administrator dashboard
CMS AND INTEGRATIONS
Progress Sitefinity was the perfect DXP/CMS for the creation and maintenance of the new customer portal due to the custom functionality and features needed to build the improved portal. The Sitefinity CMS allows Palmer administrators to manage the portal from one hub with ease. Palmer needed a system that was easy to use, allowed them to manage as much of the content as possible, and flexible enough to customize and integrate with their third-party systems. Overall security as well as role-based permissions was also an important consideration. In addition, the team at Palmer was interested in personalization so they could provide targeted advertising to various audiences as well as show and hide certain features for several types of customers (Commercial vs Residential) or customers enrolled in certain programs (Enrolled in paperless billing or rewards). Key integrations include:
- BlueCow CRM - 2-way integration for managing accounts, payments, and contracts
- QualPay - Payment Gateway handling real-time and scheduled recurring payments
- Transunion - Perform real-time credit reports on new customer applications.
