Morris Furniture Company was founded in Dayton, Ohio with a simple idea: offer quality furniture at a reasonable price with superior service. They’ve prided themselves on making homes great since 1947, and now boast a large presence across Ohio and northern Kentucky. By the end of 2024, they’ll be operating 25 total stores—including 13 Ashley Furniture locations.
The Challenge: More Productive Deliveries
In 2023, they saw an opportunity to prioritize improving the delivery experience they offered to customers. The delivery data they were collecting showed a higher-than-ideal number of cancellations, unplanned returns, and reschedules, and they knew that they could reduce those numbers and boost customer satisfaction by improving their processes.
When they drilled down to their productive delivery rate, they found there was a lot they could do to help turn up potential cancellations before their orders were routed or loaded onto trucks, most of which revolved around their customer communications.
Morris Furniture was seeking a way to engage with customers earlier, more frequently, and more impactfully to enable more productive deliveries—and DispatchTrack was there to help.
The Solution: Elevating Customer Engagement with DispatchTrack
With DispatchTrack, Morris Furniture had a partner who was just as laser-focused on customer experience as they were. Our platform offered a number of capabilities that were designed to engage customers and ensure a smooth and satisfying last mile delivery process across the board:
- Configurable customer notifications via email and text that could be segmented for different audiences (e.g. delivery vs. pickup)
- Automated route start notifications
- Schedule confirmation messages via text
- Customer feedback survey requests via text
- Live two-way messaging with customers
The Results: Fewer Unproductive Deliveries, Happier Customers
By leveraging DispatchTrack’s customer communication functionality, Morris Furniture was able to significantly decrease the number of unproductive deliveries (i.e. cancellations, not-at-homes, no-fits, incorrect items, etc.), boosting customer satisfaction in the process.
Now, customers had multiple opportunities before the delivery was underway to let Morris know that the delivery date no longer worked or that the items or address associated with their orders were incorrect. This had a huge impact on delivery productivity. Now, instead of risking damage to goods by loading trucks with orders that were destined to be brought back to the warehouse undelivered, Morris Furniture could work with their customers to find new delivery times that worked for them.
All this added up to smoother, more efficient last mile delivery operations that made their customers happier and their drivers more productive.
- Significant increase in NPS thanks to improved customer experience
- 37% reduction the rate of unplanned returns thanks to enhanced communications
- Increase in the proportion of productive deliveries
- More customer feedback and better data with surveys via text
