Automated delivery planning and chat bot interactions with customers improved delivery confirmation rates, reduced failed first-delivery attempts and led to an increase in positive online reviews.
Company Overview
Don’s Appliances has been providing exceptional brands and service since 1971. Founded by Don Hillebrand over 50 years ago, the business has grown to 11 stores. The family-owned company is now run by the second generation of the Hillebrand family, but still prides itself on being large enough to offer competitive pricing, yet small enough to offer the “white glove” service it was founded on.
The focus of Don’s Appliances has always been on the customer — from their experience online and first step into a showroom, to when the products are delivered, installed and need to be serviced.
Success Indicators
+100 labor hours freed-up monthly
+5% post-purchase sales growth
+50% delivery confirmation rate
+200% online ratings
“We’re turning deliveries into dollars with Package.ai”
Tim Hillerbrand, Co-owner, Don’s Appliances
Reasons For Approaching Package.ai
Every day the logistics team at Don’s Appliances was spending five hours manually scheduling and mapping out delivery routes for its drivers. Despite this heavy investment in time spent planning, delivery confirmation rates remained in the 60% range and caused a high level of failed first-delivery attempts. This inefficiency was not only costing the company money and time, but was also affecting their ability to compete. It was also negatively impacting customer experience and meant Don’s Appliances was struggling to generate positive Google and Yelp reviews.
The Business Challenge
Don’s Appliances’ business philosophy was always to place the customer at the heart of its business. It knew to remain true to this philosophy it needed to reassess its fulfillment process to provide a truly memorable experience that wowed its customers. To achieve this and monitor its success it wanted to:
- Transform route planning to improve its efficiency and accuracy.
- Reduce time/labor cost for planning and dispatch.
- Increase delivery confirmation rates.
- Reduce failed first-delivery attempts.
- Improve rate of positive customer experiences.
- Increase number of positive online reviews.
The Solution
- Package.ai customized and integrated its complete customer engagement platform powered by conversational AI, workflow automation and last-mile intelligence.
- The use of automated scheduling and routing dramatically focused on reducing the time spent on logistics planning.
- The implementation of a mix of chat bot and human interactions was used to ensure customers experienced a continuously-connected fulfillment process.
- Personalized fulfillment engagement targeted building deeper customer relationships to foster increased rates of brand loyalty.
Results
The swift and smooth implementation of Package.ai’s complete customer engagement platform enabled Don’s Appliances to:
- Dramatically reduce time spent planning delivery routes, freeing up over 100 hours of employee time each month.
- Continuously connected fulfillment and interactive customer engagement saw confirmation rates grow by over 50%.
- The vast improvement in customer experience saw positive online ratings grow by over 200%.
- Automated and planned engagement with customers after successful deliveries saw post-purchase sales grow 5%.
