How Atmosphere & Bois Transformed Customer Delivery Experience with GoFor

About the Customer

Aged and weathered wood reclaimed from century old barns and other buildings is a highly prized material used in many architectural and design projects. Atmosphere & Bois is an Ottawa, Ontario based business that salvages this distinctive material for customers across Europe and North America. For nearly 20 years, founder Philippe Auboyneau has shipped reclaimed Canadian wood to Europe and sold it in the company’s retail location in Belgium. In 2015 Philippe opened a store in the Ottawa area, allowing the business to serve its local market as well.

Challenges

When Atmosphere & Bois opened their Ottawa location, they shared a delivery vehicle with another lumber supplier that is also a partner and neighbor. While this arrangement saved the business the cost of buying and operating their own truck, it also meant they were, in a sense, competing for the use of a much-needed asset. According to General Manager JD Wienecke, this arrangement made it difficult to meet their customers’ requests: “Using the shared vehicle made scheduling deliveries difficult, and customers didn’t have a clear window of when material would arrive.”

Providing delivery pricing was also challenging. Atmosphere & Bois’ customers typically expect a fast answer when they request a dropoff; however, as employees had to manually calculate the rate for deliveries beyond a certain radius from the store location, they often weren’t able to provide a same day quote, which was frustrating for everyone.

How GoFor Helped

After learning about gofor’s on demand last mile delivery solution, Atmosphere & Bois decided to try it out. Creating a business account online was fast and easy, and the Atmosphere & Bois team immediately started scheduling deliveries and providing on the spot pricing.

Atmosphere & Bois’ initial concerns about rolling out a new delivery solution that staff weren’t familiar with quickly went away. “Once we started using gofor more and more, we quickly realized how great a company it is,” said General Manager JD Wienecke.

With gofor, Atmosphere & Bois can offer the right size vehicle for every order, including cargo vans, large trucks, and specialty vehicles, and they can offer a choice of 3 hour express or same day delivery as well as drop off at a scheduled date and time. “Customers always ask how much shipping will be, and now we can easily look it up for them to give them an idea based on truck size and distance,” Wienecke continued.

Employees quickly adapted to using gofor to schedule deliveries. “They love it,” claimed Wienecke. “From the quick online pricing, the help from drivers loading and unloading materials, the interactive map showing the ETA for delivery, it all really helps, and I have not had any complaints from staff.”

For us, 11/10 is when a driver shows up on time with a clean, presentable vehicle and isn’t reluctant to help a customer offload their items. It shows professionalism and that they care about the service they provide.

JD Wienecke, General Manager of Atmosphere & Bois

Results

Switching to gofor’s on demand, last mile delivery service has helped Atmosphere & Bois transform the customer delivery experience. Some specific benefits include:

• greater efficiency – The team no longer must go back and forth with customers to schedule a delivery. “We can get customers pricing right away with the online booking tool which saves a lot of time and headaches,” Wienecke says. Now delivery can be sorted out at the point of purchase, with pricing for different options provided immediately.
• improved productivity – because it is fast and easy to confirm a delivery time and provide pricing, employees spend less time figuring out how to get orders to customers and can spend more time helping additional customers.
• more transparency – gofor’s easy to use platform enables Atmosphere & Bois to always know where their customers’ deliveries are and when they can expect their orders to be dropped off. As well, features like photo proof of delivery included in the gofor driver app provide the team with greater peace of mind knowing any disputes about deliveries can be resolved quickly.

What 11/10 Delivery Experience Looks Like

“For us, 11/10 is when a driver shows up on time with a clean, presentable vehicle and isn’t reluctant to help a customer offload their items. It shows professionalism and that they care about the service they provide.”

What’s Next for Atmosphere & Bois

Lumber businesses are fortunate to have enjoyed strong sales during the covid19 pandemic; however, having the Ottawa retail location closed to customers has been difficult for Atmosphere & Bois because of the unique nature of the product. “For reclaimed wood, customers love to come in and view the material in person and be a bit more hands on in their purchase,” Wienecke explains. “We do what we can via email but are looking forward to being back fully open again.”

• Category: the gofor blog