After weeks of waiting, your dream couch finally arrives at your home, only for you to miss the delivery window. There was no update on when the couch would arrive, and customer service says they can’t see where your large, expensive purchase is or when a redelivery attempt might be made.
This frustrating customer experience is one that Sundays, a direct-to-consumer furniture brand, is trying to prevent with the help of AI. Product delivery is core to Sundays’ business; they offer free white-glove service for all large-parcel orders, Moe Samieian Jr., the company’s cofounder, told Business Insider.
He added that the many moving parts of furniture logistics “can easily consume your team’s time and attention, and as a company grows, the margin for error only shrinks.”
Nishit Nisudan, an independent supply chain and logistics consultant, said that e-commerce companies with 24-hour delivery, free shipping, and quick return processes are raising the standard customers expect, and furniture companies are trying to keep up.
“They can either compete to survive and flourish or perish like so many other traditional organizations,” Nisudan said.
To better manage these challenges and reduce damage claims, delays, and delivery escalations, Sundays partnered with Cartage AI, a freight coordination software company, to implement its autonomous AI logistics coordination tool, called Wilson.
With Wilson, Sundays has been able to automate real-time processes, including freight quoting, booking, tracking, carrier coordination, and delivery-exception handling, said Samieian.
Improving the customer experience
Logistics coordination has historically been a manual process handled by a team through phone calls, emails, and spreadsheets, but AI is changing that by automating such tasks, said Abdul Basharat, the CEO and cofounder of Cartage AI.
Where traditionally a logistics coordinator may need to log into three or four different portals per order to view truck availability and rates, get a quote, and decide who to book, AI tools like Wilson can do all that simultaneously while answering customer calls and identifying delays or problems as they arise, Basharat told Business Insider.
Like a human team member, Wilson has its own email address and phone number, and can answer customer and internal questions about outbound shipments in the same way as any member of the logistics team. Basharat said if there is a problem with an order or a question Wilson cannot answer, the software flags it and escalates the call or email to a member of the logistics team.
Previously, Sundays’ customer service workers would dig through spreadsheets to find order status information or navigate several customer portals to find available trucks and compare rates, said Basharat.
With Wilson, the software is storing all the customer data coming from phone calls and emails, plus historical information around trucking companies, so that Sundays can autonomously answer customer questions and book vendors based on real-time data.
“The moment a sales order is confirmed closed, that’s where Wilson’s job basically starts,” Basharat said, adding that the tool can source, book, and schedule trucks, and alert pickup and delivery point people when they are going to arrive.
Samieian said Wilson is also helping with Sundays’ logistics coordination since the AI tool can give visibility into the middle and final miles of delivery. Achieving true visibility in furniture logistics is especially challenging, he added, because shipments often change hands across multiple vendors, each of whom typically operates within a different system.
“Wilson has helped us bring all of that information together into a single source of truth. By connecting data across these disparate systems, it gives our teams real-time visibility into where an order is at any point in the journey,” Samieian said. He added that the connected system improved his team’s ability to proactively manage exceptions, respond to customer inquiries, and deliver a better overall customer experience.
AI-enabled coordination tools like Wilson also make it easier to get ahead of delays or escalations around customer complaints, such as damaged shipments, increase on-time pickups, and track the status of a shipment at any point in its journey, Basharat said.
“Now you just call Wilson the same way you want to call a person,” he said. “Wilson picks up immediately, he responds immediately, and that’s a really good customer experience.”
Freedom for more strategic work
Nisudan said that many warehouse and transportation management software companies are now implementing AI “to achieve better warehouse and transport utilization, optimize our available space, learn from historical data to improve efficiency, and increase productivity to gradually reduce costs.”
Wilson now handles the tracking and monitoring of deliveries after they leave the Sundays facility, saving the team hundreds of hours a month, Samieian said.
Before Wilson, this was a manual process in which the Sundays team had to look up each order individually, check its status en route, and flag potential delays by hand.
“It was time-consuming, and at our volume, the team often couldn’t get through tracking every single shipment this way, so coverage was inconsistent even with the time invested,” said Samieian.
Now Wilson automatically tracks and flags all shipments, saving the team hundreds of hours each month, he said.
This time saved, Samieian told Business Insider, allows Sundays’ employees to spend more time on product design, catalog growth, and customer relationships. Additionally, the logistics teams can focus on more strategic work, such as consolidating orders across the supply chain and managing them so they don’t get lost in the complex shuffle of furniture delivery, he said.
Read the original article on Business Insider
The post How AI could help make your furniture delivery headaches go away appeared first on Business Insider.
