Pioneer Landscape Centers—Superior customer service: Technology helps make it happen

Employees may be the face of a retail operation, but information technology is at the heart of it, the organ that keeps things flowing. That’s what Pioneer Landscape Centers discovered when the company decided to revamp the entire organization around exceptional customer service. Established in 1968, Pioneer is a leading hardscaping and landscaping materials distributor in the western United States. With production facilities in Arizona and Colorado, Pioneer operates 20 quarries and production facilities, 34 retail distribution centers, and a fleet of more than 200 trucks, making Pioneer uniquely positioned to serve commercial, industrial, wholesale, and residential customers.

While leadership recognized that employees were already well trained, highly skilled, and service-oriented, company management also knew employees could only deliver service as robust as the systems supporting them. With that in mind, this regional retailer/supplier of landscape and hardscape materials started with technology investments to help workers operate more efficiently. The company eventually wound up adding and augmenting technology that touches every part of the company to transform customer care into a level of service even retail giants would be proud to deliver.

IT begins

First, the IT team helped Pioneer to stay open during the early days of COVID-19 lockdowns by outfitting salespeople with tablets to help customers outside. As an essential business, Pioneer never shut down, so helping customers as safely as possible was a priority. The company implemented “honk-for-service” processes that allowed salespeople to help customers select and pay for materials and either pick those goods up or schedule deliveries without leaving their trucks.

This simple change was a precursor to an IT overhaul based on a strategy to tailor service for the organization’s key customer group: landscaping professionals.

Over two-thirds of Pioneer’s customers are landscaping contractors, and more than half of those are owner-operators. These people run the business and also work side-by-side with employees.

These small-business owners may spend a good part of their day moving from one job site to another, ensuring crews have the materials they need so that payroll dollars aren’t wasted as workers stand around waiting for deliveries of soil or rock. Any amount of time one of these contractors spends in Pioneer’s rock yard or store also decreases their earning ability because that business owner can’t be out working on the job site or making new sales.

Knowing this, Pioneer’s leadership team realized that on-time delivery of materials is crucial to a contractor’s success, and so are easy ways to get those materials purchased and scheduled. But Pioneer couldn’t guarantee delivery times because the company had several systems doing similar or related things, and none of them were integrated.

There was a point-of-sale system that dealt with only product pick-ups and a separate computer system used only in scheduling deliveries. These systems were not connected to inventory, so employees didn’t know what was available to sell. The systems were also not connected to the dispatch system, which was used only to restock stores from quarries and dispatch deliveries to customers.

Because employees couldn’t trust the systems to tell them how much inventory they had, they couldn’t tell customers what was available. They often over-ordered inventory through the replenishment system. Then, when it came down to deliveries, the system defaulted to the 6:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. time slot, and few employees remembered to change it. Deliveries were often backed-up, and drivers would take it into their own hands to rearrange the order of deliveries based on what was convenient, not what customers needed.

In a business where getting the product to the customer at the right time is crucial to the customer’s success, this wasn’t working. So, Pioneer started by digitizing inventory to track it more easily. Then, the company created its own operating system that brought all those disparate systems together: dispatch, inventory, and point-of-sale.

This system enabled developers to automate most of the dispatch activity, so now 80% of inventory deliveries to stores are based on inventory needs, not employee guesses. The company also outfitted drivers with tablets and now downloads delivery instructions throughout the day to accommodate traffic and optimize efficiency without impacting customer delivery commitments.

This system also enabled new ways of serving customers. For instance, Pioneer is implementing eCommerce capabilities on its website because inventory control allows that. Now a customer can go online and order products any time of day or night. Because rock and mulch are products homeowners don’t buy every day, the eCommerce site has extensive educational materials and multiple photos of each product to help homeowners know what they’re getting.

Additionally, the company created a phone-based sales team because inventory control allowed Pioneer to do so. Before adding a phone-based sales team, a busy store could receive 1,000 calls a day, many of which were people looking for things like store hours and location—information they can now get from an interactive voice response system.

Those who need to ask a question or place an order get connected to the support center, which now has 20 service representatives available to help customers from any location. More than 90% of the calls those representatives handle are from people ready to place an order. For contractors who already know what they need and where they need it, this service eliminates the time and effort of going to a store.

Fast and safe

Along with ensuring customers get products on time, Pioneer also wants to help customers save time when they come to a store. That’s why the company engineered a system designed to minimize customer-handling times. As soon as a customer places an order, the system starts counting down the seconds until that customer’s vehicle is loaded up with a product—rock, mulch, flagstone, and other materials—and the customer can drive away.

The Pioneer point-of-sale system now features a color-coded alert that shows up on the sales associate’s computer screen to tell store workers how long a customer has been waiting for someone to load up their vehicle. That light beside the customer’s name starts out green, turns orange after five minutes, and, at the 10-minute mark, it turns red, giving the sales associate a chance to troubleshoot to get the customer served more quickly. The system has been so effective that it’s cut down the time contractors average in-store from 30 to 10 minutes.

Meanwhile, any time customers spend in the stores is now safer. The company also uses an IT-supported safety system that directs employees to look for risks as they walk through the stores. Furthermore, the company has invested in automated external defibrillators and trains staff on how to use them to ensure prompt care if an employee or customer suffers from a sudden cardiac arrest.

Moreover, the company hired an environmental health and safety (EHS) team and beefed-up training for everyone working in a quarry or a store. The stores have a “certification” process for its loaders, the employees who use heavy equipment to put bulk rock and mulch into customer pick-up trucks. Pioneer did this because vehicle loading is a process rife with risks, including property damage from rocks bouncing off the vehicle or crashing through a car window. This certification process decreased property damage claims by 17.4% between 2020 and 2021, and loader-related safety incidents dropped 52%.

To ensure safety walk-throughs and training were working, Pioneer also developed a formal process for tracking the company’s Total Recordable Incident Rate (TRIR). These changes—the EHS team and computer system that supports it, as well as formal training programs and employee feedback mechanisms—allowed Pioneer to quickly achieve a TRIR of 2.31, which is 36% below the industry average.

The success of such advancements shows up in Pioneer’s year-end results. In 2020, the company saw an 18% lift in revenue. Last year posted gains, as well, reaching 5%. Technology investments paid off in a safer, more efficient organization for Pioneer Landscape Centers. That efficiency delivers a better experience to customers and employees alike.

Helping customers throughout the pandemic with customer-focused innovations and services

Kevin Guzior is the President of Pioneer Landscape Centers. Kevin began his career at Pioneer Landscape Centers in October 2007 as Vice President of Finance. He has had many responsibilities during his tenure, including business development, marketing, product development, professional/architectural sales, and created the industrial sales division. Kevin has been instrumental in client relationships, acquisitions, and marketing and branding initiatives. In addition, he earned his Juris Doctorate from the Arizona Summit in 2013.