Award for knowing how to Connect with your customers
ONE Birmingham-based distribution firm is more than happy to offer its customers a helping hand when it comes to using its products.
Connect Distribution, which employs 600 staff at its base in Small Heath, distributes parts for homes applications, ranging from small gadgets to washing machines and microwaves.
The company also creates videos which inform customers how they can fix the parts themselves, saving the cost of calling in an engineer or tradesman.
Connect Distribution also supplies the engineers themselves – keeping everyone happy.
On being crowned Retail Business of the Year, director of e-commerce Richard Williams said: “I think the judges were impressed by the effort we put in to helping consumers find ways to fix parts.
“We make a lot of videos which show people how to fix problems themselves rather than having to call in engineers all the time, holding people’s hands through the process.
“There are some competitors in our field but we also operate websites for manufacturers as well as our own brand so we are almost a competitor to ourselves.”
Celebrating its half century in 2019, Connect Distribution was recently named in The Sunday Times’ International Track 200 league table which ranks UK pri- vate companies with the growing international sales.
It has more than one million spare parts in its product range and has formed relationships with wholesale trade customers and, in recent years, expanded into Europe as well.
The firm updates its website with 200 new product lines every day.
Looking ahead, Mr Williams added: “We now see big expansion into continental Europe in countries such as The Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland so we have a strong European focus to add to our good coverage in the UK.
“So next year we’ll be back to try to win the Export Award.” fastest-