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Customer: Arhaus Furniture |
Arhaus is committed to delighting its customers by offering great design, natural materials and exquisite craftsmanship to transform homes into spaces for inspired living. Since it was founded in 1986, the company founder, who still manages the business today, has demanded uniformly excellent customer service from everyone on the Arhaus team.
Arhaus operates thirty-six (36) retail locations in fourteen states and a thriving internet and catalog delivery business across the United States with over 40,000 deliveries annually. A sign of its devotion to delighting its customers, Arhaus owns its fleet of delivery trucks with fifty-two (52) different drivers.
What business problem did Arhaus want to solve?
Prior to working with TOA, Arhaus utilized a fulltime staff of eight customer service representatives and gave their customers a four-hour “wait window” to schedule deliveries. As their business grew, it became more difficult to achieve Arhaus’ aggressive, on-time delivery goals. John Roddy, Arhaus’ VP of Logistics & Distribution was looking to implement a new Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system that would reduce costs, shrink delivery windows, cut down on paperwork, and enable multiple channels for customer communication.
Why did Arhaus choose TOA Technologies?
Arhaus searched for an automated customer communication system combined with a mobile workforce management solution to decrease the customer “wait window” and provide an enhanced delivery experience. They met with Yuval Brisker, and Irad Carmi, Co-Founders of TOA Technologies, and shared their vision of the ideal solution. Roddy had been looking for a technology solution, but what he found instead with TOA was a partner that has grown, adapted and even anticipated Arhaus’ changing needs over the years.
TOA’s ETAdirect solution was configured specifically for Arhaus to include a routing system, planning and scheduling, as well as flexible customer communications. Plus, the TOA system “learns,” so it consistently improves as it collects data on drivers and routes, and delivers reporting back to the Arhaus team.
What was Arhaus’ process to select the best partner?
The Company considered several mobile workforce management solutions. Only TOA offered a configurable, flexible, web-based solution with an attractive ROI.
What are the results?
Arhaus has seen dramatic improvements in key service, productivity and expense metrics since deploying ETAdirect. With TOA’s software as a service (SaaS) solution, the planning and routing process was reduced from taking eight full time employees up to three days per delivery to one dispatcher spending one hour per week per delivery, all while more than doubling their overall deliveries. Plus, Arhaus was able to shorten the delivery week from 6 days down to 4 - 5 days per week, even in the busy season.
In addition, the Company has experienced a 40% decrease in miles driven per delivery run. Arhaus has also realized an increase in deliveries of 38% per hour as a result of deploying ETAdirect. These significant improvements have yielded “significant dollar savings”. Mr. Roddy also noted that “Irad and his team are helping me succeed... working with them is phenomenal, they are responsive and creative.”
The solution for the drivers was initially rolled-out in less than a month. Drivers simply sign in using their cell phone, and their daily route comes up customer by customer as they go. When they get to the customer’s home, they press a single button to indicate that the delivery has started and when they have completed the stop, and when they are moving to the next stop. The dispatch team has can watch every route on a monitor in the main office, tracking every driver throughout the day to follow how they are progressing.
Plus, customers can now choose how they want to be contacted (voicemail, text messaging, email, etc). When shipments are ready to be delivered, customers can choose a date / time for delivery, and it can be scheduled online. Shortly, Arhaus will add a screen of how they want to be contacted 48 hours in advance and then the day of the delivery. Give them the ability to control their own destiny on delivery. And, because 87-92% of deliveries are to women who are home alone with children, Arhaus will shortly implement a system to put the picture of the delivery-person picture on the web site so they can see exactly who will be delivering their furniture. All of these improvements have led to an increase in customer satisfaction ratings from 81% in 2001 to 95% in 2008 across the country. And, the approval rating for delivery people has reached an industry high of 97%, with on-time delivery results that are unusually high for a large furniture store.
By the end of 2010, Arhaus will move to a 1-hour wait window and utilize POS devices that will allow their drivers to go paperless, which will generate savings of at least $60,000 / year in paper alone. Plus, the digital signature capture system will reduce labor costs an additional $20,000 to $30,000 annually, all while improving customer satisfaction.
Click here to download the Arhaus & TOA Technologies case study pdf.
