There are those who believe they understand how the Internet can improve business. Then there are those who believe they know exactly how it can help. Pat O’Keefe is among a small but growing number of petroleum marketers who number themselves among the latter.

As Sales Manager for Martinez, Calif.-based Golden Gate Petroleum – and the son of the owner, Dennis O’Keefe – he has been in the trenches and is excited about what eCommerce can bring – even in its initial stages -- to the business.

Golden Gate Petroleum is a multi-branded distributor of fuels and lubricants, marketing under the Exxon, Shell, Flying J, ARCO and Cash Oil brands throughout California and parts of Nevada. After Dennis O’Keefe purchased Golden Gate in 1978 – he had worked there for seven years prior – his son eventually joined him and spent some time with his sleeves rolled up, working shoulder-to-shoulder in the company’s order-and-dispatch department, taking orders from the company’s large base of commercial fuel purchasers – predominantly fleet operators – and industrial lubricants customers.

“It’s the kind of job where you sit down at 8 a.m. and by the time you stop answering calls, it’s time to go home,” O’Keefe says of his days in the order-and-dispatch department. “If you want to be so busy that the day flies by, that is a job for you. Of course, it takes about an hour to get over the stress. We have five guys just working on the phone all day, taking orders and answering questions. It’s a stressful job.”

Although he only held that position for about a year, it was enough for O’Keefe to see clearly one valuable way in which eCommerce could improve the company’s selling efforts and its customer service. Over the past several months, Golden Gate has been implementing an eCommere platform that he believes will quickly reduce call volume in the order and dispatch department, enable those in the department to provide better customer service – even plus-sell – and help the company promote its wide range of products both to existing customers and first-timers.

At the company’s Web site, http://www.ggpetrol.com , wholesale fuels and lubricants customers can now peruse Golden Gate’s complete offering of products and services, fill out credit applications online, place orders and search for information on specific products. Why eliminate personal contact with its customers? Doesn’t that increase the risk they will seek a more personal relationship elsewhere? On the contrary, by providing customers with a easily accessible outlet, O’Keefe believes Golden Gate will improve its ability to serve all of its customers better.

“Often, a new customer will call up to place an order, but they might have a question,” O’Keefe explains. “Sometimes the clerk doesn’t have the answer – or sometimes he’s too busy taking calls to spend the time explaining an answer -- so he transfers the customer to a salesperson. If that salesperson happens to be out selling, the customer ends up in voicemail. If the salesperson doesn’t respond to that call in a relatively short amount of time, we run the risk of losing the sale. If it’s an established customer, we run the risk of losing the account.”

With the system full up and running, O’Keefe expects to see an instant 20 percent to 25 percent decline in call volume in short order. That should quickly translate into improved customer service – even increased sales.

“Think about it,” he says. “Sometimes a customer will call up for a particular product, not knowing what else we sell. If our clerks had the opportunity to talk to them a bit, they might have an opportunity to sell them some additional products.”

Another reason O’Keefe is so bullish on the potential of the new system is that he believes the customers that will use it most are also Golden Gate’s best customers. Since the Web site automatically builds a list of frequently purchased items for each customer, those customers who order the same products on a regular basis will save time by using this feature on the Web site.

“They might have 25 different guys who place orders, and they used to have to sit there and figure out who ordered what,” O’Keefe says. “Sometimes they’d call in and say ‘just bring us the same stuff,’ and we’d be on the other end of the line saying, ‘wait a minute, which same stuff?’”

It’s been situations such as that one – in addition to the fact that most of Golden Gate’s wholesale fuels and lubricants customers are located in and around Silicon Valley, where automation is next to Godliness – that have motivated many of its customers to request the company offer an eCommerce solution that can add efficiency to their procurement processes.

“This is the computer capital of the world,” O’Keefe says. “They are all computer savvy and it’s a very computer-savvy place to do business. One of the little things they like about the system is that is sends an e-mail confirmation for each order. We are also in the e-mail capital of the world here – people do so much communicating via e-mail – and they like to be able to file the e-mail quickly.”

On the flip side, Golden Gate is also located in the high-cost-labor capital of the world, meaning anything it can do to reduce the amount of time it takes for a customer to do business with them, the more valuable they are as a supplier.

“Just like we don’t want our customers waiting on hold to do business with us, they certainly don’t want that to happen,” O’Keefe says. “They want to expedite everything they can, and ordering online allows them to do that.”