Derome responds to customer feedback with a new innovative digital product

About Derome

Derome is Sweden’s largest family-owned wood business and started with a single saw by carpenter Karl Andersson in 1946. Today, the company group is managed by the third-generation family members and employs more than 2900 people with a turnover of 11 billion SEK. Derome has historically doubled the turnover every 5th year and focus on continued growth.

Derome is vertically integrated into the complete value chain, from forest to finished houses, and represented in 75 places in Sweden, Norway and Germany. Operations include 4 sawmills, 6 production facilities, 3 house manufacturing facilities, 65 stores for professional customers, and 1800 dwellings and premises. Derome is a company in constant movement with a strong culture.

Acting on customer feedback

In 2021, Derome conducted a comprehensive survey to collect customer feedback. One of the findings included a need for customers to receive order and delivery information. As Derome provides goods to the professional market, deliveries are essential for customers to be able to plan their work. Customers turned to the switchboard to get answers about their orders and a substantial amount of calls were not served due to switchboard overload and long waiting queues.

Derome performed an analysis of the current situation and designed a high-level solution for an order-tracking service to end customers. Order tracking is a common service in the B2C industry but a complicating factor in the B2B industry is the fact that the purchaser may be many different persons from the customer and delivery addresses vary due to different construction sites. A commercial-off-the-shelf product was not available to fulfill the needs of Derome.

New digital product for order tracking

Elva introduced an agile way of working, starting with breaking down the high-level solution into a tangible minimum viable product (MVP). The MVP was delivered by Elva in 45 days and included basic, but fully functional, features to prove that the service was possible to build with cloud-based technologies in AWS. The MVP was introduced to a cluster of customers for feedback and the feature backlog was built on customer requests.

Today, the order tracking service is a fully implemented digital product within Derome with a dedicated Product Owner who constantly enhances the service and simplifies the everyday life for the customers. Every order trigger an event that is executed in AWS and presented in a weblet via an SMS or email. The message provides the customer with complete order information; when, where, and what.

Testimonial

“The digital product has been a great success for Derome and our customers. We can provide our customers with valuable order and delivery information while at the same time constantly monitoring and managing customer satisfaction. We now have a digital platform for future customer-driven innovation”

— Malin Höcks, Product Owner at Derome

Benefits

The obvious benefit for the customer included a much simpler way of planning their own work by keeping track of when orders were scheduled for delivery. For Derome, the service provided benefits not planned or expected from the start. For example, a feedback loop was introduced in the customer message making it simple for the customer to rate the delivery experience. Poor ratings were routed to responsible sales representatives who proactively were able to contact the customer and turn a bad experience into something positive. A photo of where the goods were unloaded was introduced to simplify for the customer to find the goods on the construction site.

A complete new visibility of last-mile deliveries was enabled through new KPI’s which could be presented in a separate dashboard for monitoring. The data for estimated delivery and the actual delivery resided in different systems and was integrated into the new solution. As the service was built with serverless technology in AWS, the infrastructure cost of the service was limited to $20 per month for the MVP. Finally, the most important benefit for Derome is the fact that they own the digital product. A competitor will not be able to buy the same service off-the-shelf which creates a competitive advantage for Derome.