Westnet boosts B2B sales with powerful product descriptions with Shopranos and Azure OpenAI

Since 2005, Westnet’s e-commerce platform helps corporate customers from Greece, Cyprus and Poland purchase a wide range of technology solutions. From IT and high-tech products to air conditioning, home appliances, energy solutions such as consumer batteries and LED lighting and more recently residential photovoltaics systems, the company showcases products from more than 40 brands, among which stand many tech giants. Dedicated to serving as a strategic business partner to its clients, Westnet has been experiencing rapid growth. 

Enhancing experience with content automation

In business-to-business (B2B) commerce, a well-curated product description is crucial. It not only facilitates discovery through search engines, but also enriches the customer journey by allowing them to compare product specs and features, facilitating decision-making. 

For Westnet, this seemed like a near-impossible mission. “When information was missing, customers would call or email the sales department. To create product descriptions, we’d have to contact the product manager for each product to give us details. This information would go to the digital department, which would generate the content, and then go back to the product manager for verification,” explains Eleni Banila, Head of Public Relations and Communications at Westnet. "Creating content with comprehensive attributes, descriptions, and SEO value for more than 3,000 products—that takes human resources and time." 

To find a way around the issue, Westnet partnered with SoftOne, a software company that specializes in enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM) and cloud-based solutions. SoftOne introduced Westnet to its Shopranos B2B e-Commerce platform, built using Azure OpenAI Service and Azure Cognitive Services, to automate product description generation. “Available on Azure Marketplace, users can immediately start setting it up and launch assets within 10 minutes without technical support,” explains Spyros Karavanis, Head of Research and Development of Digital Commerce and Customer Experience at SoftOne.

Shopranos integrates directly with Westnet’s ERP and CRM systems to generate highly accurate product descriptions using markdown language, which can then be converted to HTML code. The platform also goes one step further, enabling Westnet to localize product descriptions to various languages for its Greek and Polish customers. 

Westnet decided to involve its customers from the get-go. “While artificial intelligence (AI) can do a lot, we know it’s not perfect. So, we created an approval mechanism, which allows users to review the generated content before publishing,” explains Karavanis. Additionally, Shopranos includes a feature where users can enhance an existing description instantly with AI. 

Boosting customer engagement and sales

Shopranos equipped Westnet’s teams with high-quality content. "In marketing and sales, our priority is to attract new customers. With Shopranos, we can provide all the information our customers need," shares Nikos Kantiotis, e-Commerce Manager at Westnet. "We can also plug and play this readily available content into our marketing campaigns and promo newsletters,” adds Banila. “We spend 80 percent less time on creating product descriptions.”

With Shopranos doing all the heavy-lifting, Westnet’s team is free to focus on tasks that require a human touch. “Now, we don’t waste any time on searching for product information for our B2B e-shop because with Shopranos, it’s readily available. Having all the details at our fingertips helped our sales grow,” says Kantiotis. 

Westnet also enjoys increased search engine results, thanks to the optimized metadata which amplifies Westnet's online discoverability, making it easier for potential B2B customers to find Westnet when they search for products or solutions.

Furthermore, Westnet gained a competitive edge in offering personalized, automatically generated pricing. “Shopranos gives us the ability to produce a large number of product catalogs with customer-specific pricing," mentions Banila. “This personalized, backed by reliable content, streamlines the B2B customer journey, enhancing both trust and sales.” In an industry where the battle for customer attention is fierce, Westnet's strategic move to capitalize on AI established a scalable customer engagement model that will enable it to continue expanding to new product categories and markets without compromising customer care and content quality.

The next phase in B2B commerce

Westnet is already setting its sights to further diversify its product categories and expand into new markets, benefiting from Shopranos’ multilingual capabilities. “Shopranos gives us a huge advantage in new markets. Without it, we wouldn't have the capacity to create content in other languages,” says Banila. 

SoftOne aims to keep pace with Westnet's growth by continually enhancing the capabilities of Shopranos. “We encourage our developers to spend time on focusing on what the next thing is. Because of the flexibility Azure offers, we prioritize integrating Microsoft’s new solutions to our portfolio,” explains Karavanis. "Our future roadmap includes a smart chatbot that can engage customers and users in any language. So, it's another enabler for Westnet and similar companies to enhance their business."