BURNCO Reinvents Customer Experience and Reduces Call Center Volume by 70% with AWS

As business grew for BURNCO Landscape Centre (BURNCO) and order volume rapidly increased, the company's legacy systems began impacting support response times and causing delivery delays. BURNCO looked to AWS Partner Xerris to design and implement a modernized dispatch and inventory system leveraging Amazon Web Services (AWS).

As order volumes increased for BURNCO’s residential retail landscaping division, the company needed a modernization strategy to incrementally evolve the outmoded capabilities of its legacy systems. Inflexible, difficult to navigate systems were hindering the call center support team’s ability to provide timely responses to growing order inquiries and creating delays in deliveries, thus degrading the customer experience. BURNCO needed a unified retail experience that tied in point-of-sale, eCommerce, and dispatch. “We wanted an experience that would allow the customer to have a real-time, high-level, modern digital experience. With the help of Xerris, AWS was able to do that for us,” said Michael Smith, Vice President of Technology and CIO of BURNCO Rock Products Ltd.

As part of the modernization process, Xerris, an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, helped BURNCO establish development standards to sustain, protect, and secure the new infrastructure put in place with little to no disruption to mission critical legacy systems. “Xerris had a thorough knowledge of the AWS solutions and ecosystem,” said Smith. “They were able to quickly navigate our technology environment and business requirements, and then turn that around into a scalable architecture plan in a short timeframe. They showed an appreciation for where we were on the maturity cycle since we were new to the AWS experience and did not have a development methodology in place.”

The solution provided by Xerris enabled BURNCO to build an entirely new retail experience through dispatch, inventory, and customer communications, ultimately reducing the call center volume by 70%.

To break ground, Xerris worked closely with BURNCO to implement AWS Control Tower and securely spin up the new services. Xerris proposed a solution using AWS Serverless technologies including AWS Lambda, Amazon Simple Storage Solution (S3), Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), and Amazon DynamoDB to implement the new dispatch system. Using AWS CloudWatch Alerts and dashboards, Xerris deployed an automated order entry and delivery monitoring solution through Onfleet, a SaaS delivery provider.

“Windows on AWS gave us the ability to connect with multitudes of SaaS products, providing us with modern dispatch technologies,” said Amit Khare, Management Consultant & Interim Director, PMO, BURNCO Rock Products Ltd. “The value from AWS is the ability to quickly connect to new systems, pull that data in, and then transform and connect the data with SaaS products like Onfleet.” By leveraging AWS technology, BURNCO scaled its dispatching operations and seamlessly connected with other data sources written in .NET Core. By using C# and .NET Core serverless technology to migrate to AWS, Xerris implemented the complete solution for BURNCO in just a few months.

The result was a modernized customer experience with real-time order tracking, seamless logistics and delivery, real-time customer communications, and optimized delivery routes. The new system decreased delivery times by an average of 12 minutes, improving the efficiency and on-time record for the delivery fleet.

After optimizing the order tracking and dispatch systems, BURNCO moved on to modernizing its inventory management system. AWS provided a path to simplify and speed the modernization of BURNCO’s eCommerce experience. Amazon SQS capabilities provided BURNCO with the ability to consume real-time distribution of the inventory across its workflows. The technology allowed the convergence of commerce ordering with the point-of-sale ordering capabilities, which were previously disjointed.

“Without AWS, we would not have been able to create this experience, because it allowed us to continue to leverage legacy components without the need to modernize everything at the same time,” said Smith. “This incremental approach meant almost no disruption to the business and reduced our risk, making it easier to roll out to all of our locations relatively quickly.”

BURNCO initially planned a larger, multi-phased project, but instead decided to focus on dispatch first since it was a more pressing need. Once complete, the company was able to easily add on the eCommerce and inventory management capabilities since AWS provided a flexible platform and delivery methodology.

“Having a flexible platform like AWS, along with an iterative delivery methodology, helped us step through the implementation process and make alterations as we strategized during the discovery sessions,” mentioned Khare. “Our goal was to optimize our call centers for higher value engagement with the customer.”

Prior to implementing the AWS solution, navigating the legacy systems to answer logistical questions was incredibly time-consuming. With the new system, BURNCO realized a 70% reduction in call center volume. Now, data is easily accessible, and agents can quickly speak to inquires that come in. Customer communications from order to delivery are also automated. Order related calls were reduced by 30% through the implementation of the order and delivery tracking systems, and conversations are now largely focused on more complex product and sales opportunities.

The migration to AWS enabled BURNCO to offer a new dispatch and delivery capability with full scale integration, providing customers with a modern experience, the ability to easily interact with the organization, and real-time status on product orders and delivery timelines. “AWS allowed us to scale into delivering a modern, unified customer experience in a short timeframe, which was impressive,” said Smith.