Carpet King is a major flooring retailer in San Gabriel valley with two 5000+ SF stores and two warehouses with 35000 SF combined in two locations. Carpet King has been in retail business for more than 20 years. Carpet King has been aggressively marketing its brand and services through local radio, newspaper ads and trade shows.
Carpet King has a sales team of 25 representatives in two locations. Each sales rep is responsible for following up leads/accounts, measuring, estimating, material orders and installation schedules. The store management was using paper forms to track call-in and walk-in prospects, conversion and sales data by marketing sources, but it has been proven to be hard to collect and enforce due to the dynamic nature of each sales reps and it is time-consuming to fill the forms and compile the data into readable forms.
Another challenge with operation was the installation scheduling as the company normally has about 25 jobs per days with about 16 installation crews, so there has been schedule conflicts, misplaced work orders and diagrams, material short, and other errors, as all of these paper works were exchanged through faxes and phones.
Vendor product catalogs with update-to-date pricing are important for retail. As product pricing is changed more often. Calling vendor reps for latest pricing and product specs is time-consuming and waiting for vendor rep call-back delays the accurate quotations, therefore consumers buying decision.
Carpet King turned to FloorLink.net solution to automate the above challenges since its inception in June 2006. Floor Covering Soft has made some customizations to incorporate Carpet King's sales order form and installation schedulers so all forms are available at one place when installation manager dispatches a job from FloorLink.net. Floor Covering Soft also helps to setup vendor B2B accounts for Carpet King with Mohawk, Shaw and Beaulieu.
Two training sessions were conducted at both locations and handouts were distributed on how to use the system on a daily bases. As all sales representatives has been using FloorEstimate Pro estimating software from Floor Covering Soft. The adoption has been very smooth. The deployment took about two weeks. The automated tasks are:
