A chat with Clair Greenwood, eCommerce Manager

Just recently, we hit an important milestone, processing our millionth online order. We spent 30 minutes chatting to eCommerce Manager, Clair Greenwood, to find out why more customers than ever are choosing to buy online – and the reasons she and her team never sit still.

Nowadays we prefer to think of it as the customer’s ‘online hub’. They can order pretty much everything they need online, and can also manage their entire account with BOC, from checking their cylinder holdings, to making payments and accessing all of their previous orders – it’s a full paper trail all in one place.

One of the biggest misconceptions amongst customers is that it will be difficult to get set up – but we get feedback all the time about how easy it is.

If you already have a BOC account, all of your details can be accessed online; you just need to have a delivery note or invoice from a previous order to hand, put in your account number, choose a password, and you’re ready to go.

If you’re a brand-new BOC customer, you can create an account and start shopping straight away.

We’ve worked hard to make sure our customers are confident in identifying the products they need too – the shop includes a ‘re-order’ section that includes your order history, even from the very first time they sign in, with lots of pictures, size guides and even safety information.

Our first online order was around ten years ago, and last month 56% of the orders we deliver to customers were made online. That means over half of all BOC customer orders are now made online, and that’s huge.

But it’s not just a case of creating an online shop and expecting customers to make the switch. Online shopping at home has become such an intuitive experience, that we have to make sure our online store works just as well – and that’s about understanding our customers and their needs.

Our user experience (or UX) specialist is constantly working on improving useability – a good example is our ‘reordering’ feature, which allows customers to login, take a look at their last delivery and just click ‘re-order’ – no need to check what gas mix they need, or cylinder size, or call us on the phone.

They can just log in online or open our mobile app and with a couple of clicks, they’re done.

As a team, we never stop. There are always lots of ideas in the mix and it’s our job to prioritise these improvements to make sure the changes we’re making are the ones our customers most want to see. This year, for example, we’ve launched a number of online learning products and added 100’s of products to our gases section.

Connecting all the dots between everything the customer might need is really important, the popularity of our live chat function has demonstrated that customers like to interact with us online, so we’re working on ways to improve that too.

Importantly, we take lots of feedback to get things right – we use customer surveys, review best practice, and do lots of user testing to find out how customers would prefer to use the site.

There’s a lot of variety – my day can range from updating our sales team on what’s new with the site, working on some functionality with our technical and UX teams (you’d probably be surprised at how much time we spend thinking about buttons and clicks!), or working on big strategic plans for the coming year.

I enjoy that the online world is so fast moving and important to our business but most of all I love working hard with the team to make it easier for customers to do business with us. Hearing customers say we have saved them time or helped them do their job more easily is great and gives me and the team a boost to continue doing what we do!

It's quick and easy to manage your BOC account and shop online.

There’s an online hub for customers in both the UK and Ireland – select the link for your location to find out quite how easy it is.

Visit the BOC online hub in the UK
Visit the BOC online hub in Ireland