Do you expect any supply difficulties in the second half of the year?
We are going to have container availability challenges. However, we are trying to meet this with improved forecasting and reinforcements to our local inventories. We are also increasing time frames for receiving and expediting orders as much as possible. This challenge is affecting all segments across the board, and we anticipate the situation to ease up in early 2022.
What are some of the pleasant surprises you are seeing?
We have been able to maintain fill rates in the upper 80 percentile since the beginning of the year, which means we are meeting our customers' demands very well in spite of logistical challenges.
Even though we are showing certain key sizes lower than we'd like, we are doing everything in our power to continuously improve our fill rates and customer satisfaction. Challenges always bring about opportunities for growth and betterment.
Nexen recently launched Nexen Tire Garage, a digital one-stop shop containing marketing tools and resources for Nexen dealers. What was the strategy behind this development?
As mentioned before, the pandemic brought about opportunities and urgencies to ease our customers' burdens as much as possible. The strategy behind Nexen Tire Garage is to provide our dealers with easy access to all of our major resources, programs and tools.
We have also launched a few new programs to aid our customers' outreach to consumers in digital, socially distanced and innovative ways. Ensuring our dealers can easily access existing and new assets was the priority to develop this one-stop shop.
This toolbox of offerings, so to speak, is still new, and we are seeing month-over-month increases in click-through rates and overall usage. For anybody that has not checked it out yet, we would just like to remind them that this is meant to be a resource whenever needed.
It's an easement to access tools from Nexen Tire to save them time and get them back to the important parts of their business.
Another recent innovation has been your new enhanced mobile app. How is that innovation being received? Have you gained traction from consumers using the app? What type of engagement are you seeing with dealers?
The Nexen Tire App is a great resource for dealers and consumers alike to attain Nexen product information, augmented reality features, Nexen resources and so much more.
The app has been received well for all of these features. The highlighted offering of the Nexen Tire app was to connect consumers currently in the market with Nexen dealers in their area and request an appointment. We believe the pandemic has slowed the adoption of this feature, but we still anticipate much opportunity from this functionality.
In the meantime, while we all work to get back to our "new normal," the app is still an incredible offering for our customers with many other functions.
Nexen's new social media platform N'Social allows dealers to increase their social media audience, bolstered by Nexen-provided content. How is this program going? How will it help save dealers time and increase sales?
N'Social is a groundbreaking feature for Nexen dealers to engage with their audiences via social media with practically no effort at all. We