Floor Coverings International: The Goal

Floor Coverings International provides a unique in-home experience in which a design team visits homeowners in a Mobile Flooring Showroom® with more than 3,000 flooring choices to view alongside existing lighting, paint, and furniture.

Dominant in the mobile flooring sector, Floor Coverings International has over 150 branches in the United States and Canada. Tom Wood, CEO of Floor Coverings International, challenged his team to meet these goals at scale:

• Increase deal closure rate by 25% without increasing the size of the sales team
• Follow up with 100% of new sales prospects within minutes

Floor Coverings International: Communication Strategy

Tom recognized that the first personal contact with a homeowner is the first moment in the customer journey in which his company is powerfully differentiated in the customer's mind—but is often challenging to achieve because most leads are shared in real time with competitors who seem alike until that point.

He focused on lead-to-appointment conversion as a critical fulcrum for meeting this challenge. Based on best practices in related industries such as roofing and construction, where Lumin.ai scheduling delivers over 50% lead conversion rates, the use of artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled text interactions and appointment scheduling was a natural starting point.

In addition to following up efficiently, Floor Coverings International could communicate with its prospects how they wanted and when they wanted—a “native channel” strategy that the home-improvement franchise has advocated as part of its strategy to place customers first.

Meeting customers on mobile is an essential part of our brand experience.

——Stacey Vogler, CMO

The Solution: Lumin.ai

Lumin.ai provided Floor Coverings International with a smart conversational AI bot solution that engages prospects using text messages. It permits the prospect to communicate in natural-language sentences with no prior instruction or exposure, and without having to stick to a rigid flow preconceived by a software developer. Unlike a “virtual assistant” used in a smartphone or smart speaker, it holds multi-turn collaborative conversations.

Lumin.ai ensures that all leads are engaged immediately, and that next steps are scheduled efficiently based on the calendar availability of Floor Coverings International franchisees all across the US and Canada.

It integrates smoothly with Floor Coverings International’s existing calendar and CRM system (Salesforce), ensuring that all sales efforts are coordinated, and that the customer relationship enjoys continuity.

The bot greatly increased our marketing ROI and provided a better experience for our customers. It’s pretty cool—it went from pilot to mission critical almost overnight.

——Ryan Aschauer, CIO

Floor Coverings International: The Results

A self-contained AI platform, Lumin.ai was easy for Floor Coverings International to deploy system-wide. In addition to immediately scheduling visits, the solution also maintained a continuous, convenient point of contact for leads who needed longer to decide.

Floor Coverings International met or exceeded all of the goals associated with the project. Specific metrics tracked by the team illustrate a strong return on investment (ROI) for Wood’s 100+ national branches.

This platform has achieved the highest ROI of any platform in use by Floor Coverings International.

—Tom Wood, CEO