Chards 2019 End Of Year Wrap Up

Improving our service  

2019 has also seen us a reach a fantastic milestone with customer engagement and satisfaction, reaching 1000 reviews on TrustSpot. This impartial third-party exclusively hosts reviews submitted on the back of verified purchases so you know that every positive review is legitimate. We don’t see this as simply just another marketing tool, these customer reviews are an unbiased insight into our service, and we value each comment and the time spent giving us this feedback. We take all these comments on board and have actively improved numerous aspects of our service on the back of this; adding “pre-order” when appropriate to purchasing icons, updated basket and checkout pages and more in an effort to always offer a clear service.  

Our newly introduced distance buying initiative has also made selling your coins and precious metal collection to us a far more safe and convenient process. Whilst you may always drop your goods off to us in person by visiting the showroom, or post with Royal Mail, the latter will only protect your items up to a value of £2,500, making liquidating a large portfolio or having an inheritance valued impractical. However, through our distance buying service we will organise the collection of your goods from your home by courier service, with items up to £30,000 being insured, making getting a return on your investment simple, convenient and safe. For our international customers we have also recognised that the exchange rate may not work in your favour and therefore automatically started paying out in the appropriate local currency, further simplifying the liquidation process for our clients.

Unfortunately, it would be impossible to display the thousands of items that we have in stock at any one time, making the 50,000 pages on our webstore the most practical solution, not to mention it saves our global customers a fairly lengthy commute. With this in mind the year has seen our website undergo many, quality of life and user interface improvements, with our live precious metal price graphs now showing the currency exchange in Dollars, Euros and Yen, alongside how these values have been influenced over time.  

Trusted Gold and Bullion Dealers  

Whether it is through our investment guides, informative blogs, news pieces, engagement over forums or highlighting the ill practices of our fellow bullion dealers, we endeavor to maintain the trust and confidence the community holds in our brand.  

Taking the majority of our transactions online has presented unique challenges not only in exposure and customer interaction but also security. To ensure the safety of our customer’s details through this medium we recently underwent a breach test performed by ethical hackers. The online security specialists found no vulnerabilities within our site, confirming that sensitive client data is inaccessible by malicious parties.  In spite of this brilliant result we are always active in adding more security features to our online space, with Chards being one of the only coin and bullion dealers to use a dual authentication system. This means that when logging in a customer will have to enter their password alongside a code is generated by their smartphone, adding another layer of security and further preventing a breach.  

Fresh Faces  

We often hear that some of our longstanding customers who initially came to us through our older sites favour these over our more recent webstore. As a result, we have welcomed new members to our marketing team, to help move the popular legacy content onto our new platform as well as making the site easier to navigate with a more natural feel.  With over 50,000 pages on our site and growing, finding a specific item can be a hassle for those buying on behalf of a friend or relative.  Customers are now able to filter our stock by specific designs, country of origin and value by ounce, to name a few, meaning that regardless of whether you are looking for a gift, the next investment, or an attractive collectors set you can find the ideal items that best suit your needs.

The latest additions to the Chards team have helped us expand on our existing service, with the extra hands allowing us to streamline many internal procedures that ultimately benefit the customer. We are now able to review surplus stock, grade and upload coins, catalogue and review our products more often and in greater detail, meaning we have an increasingly diverse range of investment and collectable options that grows by the day. This also has an impact on the number of our products that are “sourced to order”, what is essentially pre ordering a coin, bar or set until we have the goods back in stock, will now be greatly reduced, meaning less waiting for your purchase.

Getting to know our customers 

As stated before, whilst our showroom isn't the largest, but we openly invite anyone to swing by for a brew and a chat, but this isn't feasible for everyone and our webstore offers little in terms of face to face interaction, so we thought it was about time we left the comfort of the showroom behind and attended coin fairs. Now of course we have done this before and it is not new to 2019 however, we have attended more fairs than any previous year. We have increased our presence at the Berlin World Money Fair and attended three of the four annual London coin fairs, personally talking to members of the numismatic community, sharing a common interest and learning more about how we can evolve our service to be more attentive to the requirements of our collecting demographic. These coin fairs afforded us a fantastic opportunity to connect with our customers whilst industry professionals helped us to break specialist niches such as cataloging bank notes and tokens, all while making our international footprint more defined.   

Chards Employee of the Year 2019!

And the winner is... 

The votes have been counted and the results are in! Chard's resident IT wizard and Web Developer has taken the prestigious and highly coveted Employee of the Year Award. Callum's role as web developer keeps the constant online improvements rolling out on time and as smoothly as possible, ensuring the customer journey is seamless, with each page being intuitive to navigate. Well, this is what he will tell you, personally I have only seen him fix the printer twice with one failed attempt.