The Client
North America’s largest flooring seller
The Challenge
Carpet One, a privately-owned, flooring retailer with over 1,800 stores and annual sales in excess of 4 billion dollars, approached Haverstick Consulting in the spring of 2000 with a challenge.
Carpet One’s national accounts initiatives were suffering. The national accounts program was designed to bring large companies with high-volume flooring demands (such as realtors and insurance agencies) in contact with Carpet One stores, but it was becoming increasingly complex and time-intensive for both the store owners and the national accounts’ clientele.
Increasing paperwork requirements for each transaction, coupled with the latency associated with paper-based fax and “snail mail” was bringing many of the initiatives to a standstill. Frustration with the paper process was also extremely high among the store owners.
The client’s objectives were to have:
- The ability for Carpet One’s national accounts to have seamless, near real-time communication to local area stores to distribute sales leads.
- The ability for Carpet One to monitor and maintain all traffic through this leads system without paperwork or additional manpower.
- The ability to effectively report the status of all sales lead activity within the system at all times.
- The ability to easily scale and customize the system for specific national account needs.
The Haverstick Approach
The Haverstick Consulting team architected a Web-based application (called "FloorLeads") that would allow all communication between the store owners and the national accounts’ clientele to be virtually immediate and paperless.
By migrating all of the required lead information over to an electronic IP-based platform, we were able to minimize the duplication of effort, substantially reduce clerical errors and almost eliminate any latency in communication between the contact points. The application was designed to monitor the status of each sales lead in the system. It then automatically notified both the store owner and the client via e-mail and fax should an issue not be resolved or responded to within 24 hours.
Aspects of particular importance to the client:
- Ease of use—Primary users, the national accounts’ clients, are able to easily and quickly input the necessary sales lead information and disseminate it to the nearest Carpet One store, as well as be able to monitor the sales lead’s status.
- Scalability—The architectural solution is scalable.
- Customizable—The core application can easily be modified for new accounts.
- Ongoing maintenance—Haverstick Consulting provided all managed care services for the client, including technical support, content management support, training, and complete application hosting.
The Result
The FloorLeads program has been a tremendous success. The application is able to make estimation and approval processes much faster and simpler by providing appropriate templates to the store owner that are simple and easy to use. All information is captured in a centralized database that allows Carpet One administrators to easily monitor all activity and see instant reports on sales volume and lead statuses.
To date, over five separate programs have been initiated with a monthly volume of over 20,000 leads entering the system monthly. The lead-to-sale conversion process has been reduced by over 500%, and the conversion ratio of leads to sales has increased over 100%. And with over $200,000 in sales generated from this online solution within the first six months, the revolutionary FloorLeads program quickly paid for itself. | 
