Scaling Eco-Friendly Logistics with Airkit

Before your plants called your house or apartment home, they likely traveled a long way to get to you or your local plant store. The nursery in which they were raised probably shipped them across the country to a network of big box retailers and smaller flower shops prior to arriving to you. 

For the end-consumer, safely transporting a single new plant from a nursery can be a challenge. For Reusability, coordinating a delivery network of 10,000+ retail partners spanning the entire country and maintaining a well-oiled logistics machine is just another day at the office. 

As part of their mission to help companies leverage reusable packaging programs, Reusability builds and manages eco-friendly packaging that nurseries and leading retailers like the Home Depot, Costco, and Menard’s use to ship plants in an environmentally and economically sustainable way. Reusability’s returnable packaging product for nurseries, EZRack, enables clients to nearly eliminate packaging waste and fit more products in each shipment. 

As the company grows rapidly in size and scope, they need a customer service and operations platform that is able to grow alongside them. When Reusability wanted to streamline their contact center performance, level up their customer experience, and deliver white-glove service to their biggest customers, they turned to Airkit. Now, Reusability feels confident they’ve found the platform that will be the foundation of their customer service going forward.

Scaling Alongside Eco-Friendly Success 

Reusability’s corner of the market is eco-friendly logistics. Their business is focused on executing the most environmentally sustainable supply chains, and a large part of their work deals with how their EZRacks are shipped to and recovered from customers.  

Managing pick up and drop off of EZRacks across the country is no small task, especially as Reusability continues to onboard more customers. For nurseries and retailers, using EZRacks significantly cuts down their shipping costs as well as their carbon footprint. One Reusability customer saved $2.75 million over 4 years using EZRacks as opposed to one-time use racks while cutting 4,921,475 pounds of CO2 emissions in the process.

As more and more customers turned to cost-effective, eco-friendly shipping, Reusability’s contact center agents became increasingly busy. Their agents found it difficult to handle the volume of customers calling with basic questions like the following: can I order more EZRacks? When will my EZRack arrive? And how can I arrange a pickup?

Reusability’s contact center received thousands upon thousands of calls from customers checking and updating orders, and agents could only handle about 300 calls per day. With all agents busy helping customers with these recurring, high-traffic calls, some customers were unfortunately made to wait. 

During busy seasons, Reusability onboarded seasonal contact center agents to help handle the spikes in call volume and serve customers faster. But the training and onboarding process still cost the company valuable time that could have been used to serve customers as well as a non-trivial amount of capital. 

Today, Reusability uses Airkit to empower contact center agents to work more efficiently, save money on staffing, and boost customer satisfaction.

The Impact of Airkit

Reusability recognized that the problem with their contact center was reliance on manual processes. When a customer wanted an update on their order, they had to call. When an agent needed to access or update that order information, they had to do so manually. This led to what can only be described as a game of telephone.

When a piece of information is handed from the customer to the agent and manually transcribed into a CRM, there are multiple opportunities for errors. Airkit automates that process.

Airkit connects Reusability’s front end call center software to their CRM, so agents can look up information easily, and log information accurately. This helps Reusability serve customers faster and provide timely answers to questions regarding their order, reducing call handle time and increasing customer satisfaction. 

It’s the type of solution Reusability knew they wanted to build but was unsure of how to do so before finding Airkit. When they looked at building the solution from scratch with a third party vendor, they realized they’d be solving one problem only to create another. They’d be reliant on the external vendor to make any changes to their customer experience flow, which would undoubtedly take time and add additional cost to an already expensive deployment. 

Using Airkit, Reusability not only connected their contact center to their CRM without writing a line of code, but they also built a self-serve solution for customers that helps them get answers to common order questions fast.

And it wasn’t a team of Reusability engineers that put together this Airkit solution. It was a team of marketers and salespeople. Airkit’s low-code, SaaS-powered platform gives anyone, regardless of their background, the ability to craft customer experience solutions with no coding required in an intuitive environment. 

Now, Reusability customers can call in and speak to an agent or opt to follow a self-serve flow. If the user selects self-serve, Airkit texts a link to their phone so they can find answers to their questions immediately.  

To better serve their biggest customers and provide a more personalized experience, Reusability built large retailers like Home Depot and Costco custom Airkit-powered domains they can access easily to get order updates or check on the status of a shipment. 

To date, Reusability’s Airkit-powered contact center solution has doubled the volume of calls agents can field and reduced their spend on seasonal hiring. That’s just the start. They’re already designing more custom apps to delight customers and looking for the next opportunity to build with Airkit.