ABOUT:

Roth Living distributes luxury kitchen appliances to dealers, who can “test drive” appliances and attend cooking events at Roth Living’s showrooms in five cities.

Roth Living distinguishes its business through an intense emphasis on the customer’s installation experience. Appliance experts are available for on-site visits to help homeowners assess the best options for their lifestyles. At installation, Roth Living’s factory-certified installers thoroughly train customers on key features of their new appliances.

Roth Living customers also get an extra year of full factory warranty on Wolf, Sub-Zero, and Cove appliances, plus a free follow-up visit six months after installation.

INDUSTRIES:

Kitchen appliances, including outdoor grills

SERVICES:

Sales, installation, and support of Wolf ovens and cooktops, Sub-Zero refrigerators, Cove dishwashers, and Best range hoods.

LOCATIONS:

Denver, Kansas City, St. Louis, Minneapolis, and Salt Lake City. Headquarters: Denver, CO.

EMPLOYEES: 90 // FIELD STAFF: 16

Roth Living’s hallmark—delivering a superb customer experience—requires more than luxury products, impressive showrooms, and talented professionals. Management knew that these essential components of Roth Living’s brand image could be undermined by errors, inefficiencies, or mediocrity elsewhere in the business. In short, behind-the-scenes operations, such as scheduling, billing, communications, and reporting, directly or indirectly impact customers’ perceptions.

According to John McClelland, Manager of Information Systems, before Next Service, Roth Living’s workflows and legacy system were inadequately supporting the company’s efforts to build strong relationships with customers. “To give our customers the experience they expect, everything has to work in sync digitally between field installers and the home office—but that wasn’t happening,” he said. “Paperwork and our legacy system were getting in the way.”

In 2020, Roth Living chose NetSuite as the foundation of a far-reaching modernization program. NetSuite is the leading cloud-based platform that integrates accounting, billing, inventory, financial reporting, HR, and e-commerce functions in a single system.

While implementing NetSuite, Roth Living learned about Next Service, the only field service management application that works natively within NetSuite. In 2021, after examining multiple options, Roth Living selected Next Service as the ideal path for adding field service functions to NetSuite’s core capabilities.

Business Challenges

Roth Living caters to a discerning clientele who demand exceptional product performance and superior service.

Before Roth Living implemented NetSuite and Next Service, appliance professionals always strived to meet and exceed customer expectations, but they faced two major obstacles.

1. All field service functions were paper-driven. Roth Living had no field service management system. Schedules for pre-sale visits, installations, and post-installation follow-up visits were all handled manually. Work orders and service reports required installers and office staff to complete more paperwork. Significant amounts of data from these manual efforts were redundantly rekeyed in billing, inventory, and reporting workflows. Since implementing Next Service, the administrative workload related to field service functions has been reduced by more than 50%, according to McClelland.
2. Core administrative functions—including accounting, billing, inventory, and financial reporting—were performed by an obsolete ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system. “We were operating our business on an archaic platform that was cumbersome to use. It lacked the strong features and capabilities of modern ERP platforms,” said McClelland. “To make matters worse, the vendor was ‘sunsetting’ product support.”

Combined, these two deficiencies could potentially scar Roth Living’s reputation for impeccable customer service. Red flags were popping up occasionally, such as billing errors and scheduling conflicts. The errors and oversights caused rework and delays—and sometimes, apologies to customers affected by these miscues.

Why Roth Living Chose NetSuite + Next Service

After coping so long with obsolete ERP software—and no field service management system—Roth Living employees embraced the opportunities opened up by modern technology. By implementing Oracle’s NetSuite, the company could now tap into all the benefits of a unified, highly integrated suite of ERP applications on a single cloud-based platform.

“We needed a way to extend the power of NetSuite to benefit our field installers, who make up one of the primary customer-facing parts of the business. Next Service gave us exactly that,” said McClelland. “It works seamlessly within the NetSuite environment.”

“Next Service’s scheduling functionality is a perfect fit for Roth Living. It provides exactly what we were looking for to help grow the installation side of our business.”

– John McClelland, Manager of Information Systems

Business Impact of Implementing Next Service

Less than four months after the Next Service implementation began, Roth Living went “live” with many of the system’s capabilities. In its first year of using Next Service, the company is already achieving significant benefits.

According to McClelland, these include:

• Greater efficiency in the field. The Next Service mobile app gives field personnel easy access to accurate information. The app also enables the rapid completion of checklists and call reports. As a result, field personnel can now complete more assignments each week.
• Efficiency gains in the back office. Redundant data entry has been almost eliminated because information captured in the field flows to the office in real-time. The native integration of Next Service with NetSuite pays off with faster, more accurate billing and reporting.
• Time savings. Next Service has eliminated much of the paperwork that consumed a significant portion of every workday for Roth Living’s field personnel. Time-consuming, back-and-forth communications by email, text, and phone have been slashed, too.

“Next Service has drastically cut our paperwork. We’re seeing a night-and-day difference in the time spent on getting information from the field and using it efficiently in our workflows.”

Another benefit—improved customer communications—stemmed from NetSuite’s extensive partner community of application developers. Hundreds of software developers make NetSuite their development foundation. If a developer’s application operates natively within NetSuite—as Next Service does—it earns Oracle’s coveted “Native SuiteApp” badge, designating the top level of integration.

Next Service collaborated with Message Media, which has also operated natively within NetSuite, to enhance Roth Living’s customer communications. McClelland explains: “It was a no-brainer to integrate Message Media with Next Service to get our customer messages out faster. We use the integration to communicate when the appointment is scheduled and when the technician is on the way. Once the job is complete, we send our customers a link to a survey to complete.”

“Our surveys are showing a big improvement in customer satisfaction since we implemented NetSuite, Next Service, and Message Media. We currently have a 98% positive review percentage.”