The Main Goal
The main goal of the platform was to modernise Lee Kee’s business operations. Where previously processed manually, the LKonnect platform was designed to create a seamless ordering experience while providing an online portal for their customers to access account information and carry out account actions.
The goal was to create a platform that transformed the Lee Kee group by removing the strain of customer service from teams of staff, freeing them up for more focused tasks and projects.


Technology
The platform was built using Craft Commerce as the core technology. Craft was powerful enough to give Lee Kee the functionalities they required, whilst also giving enough flexibility to allow us to create a custom portal for their staff.
We integrated with Vonage to power SMS notifications. This modern customer interaction software allowed Lee Kee to offer instant customer touchpoints and the most important stages of the customer’s experience.
When metal prices fluctuate, so then do the prices of Lee Kee's products. Additional factors such as currency prices, logistic rates and warehousing costs also impact the product prices. Because of this we needed a custom product logic, and only a flexible data structure and workflow process can overcome the complexity involved while meeting the business needs. This logic was built from scratch within the Craft Commerce framework.

Challenges
Although the design phase was a simple brief - take the Lee Kee brand identity and apply it to a new customer portal - the design challenge it posed was another story.
We needed to create a seamless online experience Lee Kee, where customers could control their accounts, place orders, and view new products with prices that change dynamically from time-to-time – and all for a customer base that, for this type of product, a digital platform was a completely new experience.
This meant we had to carefully consider all the user personas that would be interacting with the platform to create a portal that was simple for them to use whilst giving them the required level of control they were used to.
The result was a clean and crisp UI design that delivered on our aim to bring customers a portal that gave them the controls they required but without creating a confusing and challenging experience for them.

Results
The LKonnect platform is being rolled out in stages for Lee Kee’s entire client base (digitalisation of an established corporate can’t happen overnight!) - but we expect that there will be a steady increase in customer engagements that will eventually lead to improved internal business metrics.