Marine Home Center
Marine Home Center elevates its customer experience with Parcel Pending lockers
| About Marine Home Center: |
|---|
| Marine Home Center is a home improvement retailer located in the heart of Nantucket, Massachusetts. Marine Home Center opened as a lumberyard in 1944 and has diversified and expanded its five-acre campus to become the market leader in high quality and performance building material distribution with retail departments offering hardware, paint, tools, home furnishings, appliances, and home goods since 1973. Marine Home Center’s sales expertise, professional delivery, installation, and in-home services help the building trades, contractors, caretakers, and homeowners turn Nantucket homes into charming and cherished estates. |
| Challenge | Results | Solution |
|---|---|---|
| To keep up with customer needs, Marine Home Center, a Nantucket home improvement retailer, was looking to extend their hours of operation without the overhead costs of staffing associated with keeping the store open longer. | A paint supplier, Benjamin Moore, suggested the concept of lockers as a viable solution and recommended Parcel Pending by Quadient as a preferred vendor. Marine Home Center chose an indoor Buy Online, Pick-up in Locker (BOPIL®) solution and worked closely with the Parcel Pending team on locker configuration, installation, training, and marketing. | Customer acceptance has been fantastic. Over 1,000 parcels have been delivered through the lockers in the six months since their installation in November 2020, and 100 percent of customers surveyed rated the lockers easy to use and that they would use the lockers again. With the lockers, both staff and customers save time with pickup, and congestion in the store is much reduced. The lockers are advertised as “open 24/7”, which enables Marine Home Center to extend their hours without actually having to keep the store open and staffed. |
Fulfilling the customer’s needs
With customers always top of mind, Marine Home Center was looking to extend their hours of operation without the overhead costs of staffing and keeping the store open longer. “Painters wanted us to open earlier, and consumers wanted us to stay open later,” remarked Ron Foster, General Manager of Marine Home Center. This prompted Foster to explore and seek advice on developing a paint order/in-store pickup program. While Foster was familiar with the locker concept from seeing them at other retailers, it was a paint supplier, Benjamin Moore, that first suggested the concept as a viable solution and recommended Parcel Pending by Quadient as a preferred vendor.
“Benjamin Moore had relayed their experience and suggested that Parcel Pending was great to work with,” said Foster. “We were assigned a Parcel Pending sales consultant who took a lot of time over the phone and through numerous emails to explain how the locker system worked. We discussed our goals and our customer type to arrive at the best locker configuration for our program.”
“Great idea, huge time saver, great foresight on putting these in, as I know they were planned before the current COVID-19 pandemic. Even if the pandemic had never happened, we would have still utilized them as much as we do now.”
Delivering a customized solution
Marine Home Center chose an indoor Buy Online, Pick-up in Locker (BOPIL) solution, which was initially planned for BOPIS (buy online, pick-up in-store), but has since been utilized for all orders – not just paint – placed at the register, via phone calls, text messages, or emails. With very detailed had a room with its own separate entrance built specifications proved by Parcel Pending, Foster in a former lumber barn in Marine Home Center’s campus to station the four towers of 33 lockers. These lockers enable Marine Home Center to place 33 individual orders in the locker towers.
“Once we signed up, we were assigned an account representative who took us through to the installation together with the installation coordinator,” said Foster. “They sent out an experienced installer who completed the installation in one day. Then our account representative handled all the training, and he has been very responsive and checks in with us regularly. He even brought in the Parcel Pending marketing team to help launch our program.”
“Delivering orders to the lockers is so easy. We had several employees using it the same day that they were installed,” said Foster. Once orders are delivered to the lockers, the locker system takes care of the rest. A barcode is sent automatically to customers to notify them that their order is ready for pick-up as well as automatic reminders, which are sent to the customer until their order is picked up. Both staff and customers save time – customers do not need to wait in line to pick up their purchases and staff do not need to handle will-call orders. “There is also less congestion in the store since the lockers are conveniently located with a separate entrance and the customer can park right outside the door,” explained Foster.
Excellent customer reception
“Customer acceptance has been fantastic, from consumers to our contractors,” said Foster. “Since our lockers are open 24/7, customers know they do not have to rush down to squeak in before we close.” Over 1,000 parcels have been delivered through the lockers in the six months since their installation in November 2020, and 100 percent of customers surveyed rated the lockers easy to use and that they would use the lockers again. Of the customers who have utilized the lockers, 60 percent are contractors and 40 percent are consumers.
“The COVID-19 crisis probably had something to do with the quick acceptance of our lockers, but we were very glad that we had just commissioned the lockers when the pandemic hit,” Foster added. “We’re also pleased that our customers continue to sign up to use them and express that the system is organized and easy to use.”
“We advertise our lockers are open 24/7, which enables us to stretch our hours without actually having to keep the store open just for order pick-ups. We are not open on Sundays, but customers can order late Saturday and pick up their orders on Sunday. Consumers order online and our webstore specifies that all orders will be delivered to the lockers. We cannot imagine not having them.”
Parcel Pending by Quadient is the leading provider of package management solutions for residential, commercial, retail, and university properties in the United States and Canada. With nearly 3 million packages successfully delivered monthly, we offer a wide range of solutions that ensure the simple and secure delivery and retrieval of packages and online orders. With the strength of our combined power, reach, and offerings, Parcel Pending by Quadient provides state-of-the-art solutions and world-class customer service to solve the last-mile delivery challenge.