Furniture For Life

Overview

As one of the fastest growing furniture wholesalers in the United States, Furniture For Life (FFL) markets and supports a family of brands committed to superior design. Their quality products are built with a promise of a lifetime warranty, resulting in a highly utilized customer service and repair team.

Challenge

In recent years, Furniture For Life has been extremely successful in growing their brand and expanding their customer base. As a result, long term warranty repair work and aid in customer support was mirroring that growth. The company needed a way to keep up with this heightened customer demand that could scale better than simply continuing to hire more staff members. The company turned to Radial for a custom solution.

Custom Built Vs. General Platform

During the early phases of the project design, Radial looked into feasible solutions that were already on the market, ensuring FFL would be getting a solution that could entirely fit their needs. At this point, it was clear that FFL needed a more traceable line of communication between support staff, technicians, and general customers, as opposed to their sole reliency of phone calls in the past.

Two possible solutions were to create an entirely custom interface or utilize a general platform, such as Salesforce Community. We found that creating custom software would not only be a cheaper alternative, but would solve the following problems:

• Developing the application software would have limited version control capability through the Salesforce Community. With custom software, we could offer history reversibility and separability.
• Automated testing was available, but limited, through Salesforce Community. This did not reach Radial’s standards of testing.
• Exclusively lives in the software environment of Salesforce Community, meaning there isn’t a straightforward way to add software to increase productivity. Radial values utilizing text editor tools like ADAM to maximize project customizations, while having consistently faster build times through a more concise project management system.

Solution

As a result, Radial developed a web portal built in Ruby, accessible through desktop and mobile devices. Authorized clients now have access to a user friendly interface, displaying informational resources and guidance through individual needs. Technicians and support staff members enjoy a fully interactive portal to update customer case statuses, and direct contact to ANATA headquarters for immediate assistance.

“My experience working with Radial was great. It was easy to work with them in terms of defining scope and getting the product launched. The execution was satisfactory with a fair price.” CFO, Furniture For Life

Outcome

Clients: The web portal has quickly been adopted by Furniture For Life dealers, as they now have direct access to view their order status online at any time, rather than having to wait and speak with personnel.

Internal: The usage of the portal within the support team is steadily growing as employees grow comfortable with the new technology. Data to support customer needs and specific order references are stored for easy accessibility and comprehension.

As a result of this project, Furniture For Life can be confident that the support they provide to their clients will continue to grow along with their increasing company size.