Maintaining Excellent Customer Service at Scale for R&R Products, Inc.

Sometimes, no matter your best intentions, a project can be laden with difficulties. That was certainly true for the R&R Products, Inc., company in the early stages of their eCommerce journey. 

When the R&R team decided their new goals were to expand from the golf products industry into the landscaping market, all while keeping up their commitment to customer service, they knew they would need a stable website with a great user experience. Unfortunately, they were working with a Solutions Integrator that wasn’t able to handle the complexity of the upgrade their website needed, from M2 Open Source to M2 Commerce Cloud. 

That’s when R&R began their search for an agency partner that had the experience and confidence needed to get into the weeds of coding complexities and also the expertise to pull the project out of those same weeds. 

CUSTOMER SERVICE AND GROWTH GOALS

R&R Products, Inc., is a name that’s synonymous with quality. As the world’s leading manufacturer of turf equipment replacement parts for the commercial turf industry, their dedication to serving the needs of golf courses, athletic fields, and more with high quality products has never wavered since their founding in 1971.

Not only that, despite their catalog featuring over 32,000 quality replacement parts, accessories, and more, their team takes superior customer service so seriously, they proudly offer a 98% rate on products being shipped the same day their order is received. When you order from R&R, you can be assured that not only will you get a quality product, you’ll also get it in a timely fashion. 

Looking to the future, R&R is also pursuing growth into the general landscape industry, hopeful they can bring their brand of quality and service to another market. 

But, with a site that worked directly against these objectives, an update with better functionality wasn’t just wished for—it was an absolute necessity.

BLOCKED BY FAULTY TECH

Standing in the way of the R&R team’s goals was an outdated website that wasn’t functioning at a level commensurate with their commitment to customer service. Their M2 Open Source website contained an abundance of archaic, specialty code, making it slow to load and hard to use. 

Having a stable website with a great user experience is absolutely crucial to R&R Products’ mission that every shopper gets the same excellent customer service every time they visit their website. 

Unfortunately, the complex fixes that would be needed weren’t achievable with the SI they were currently working with. Facing frustrated customers and internal team woes as well, Brian Larson from R&R felt the pressure to fix their eCommerce presentation so acutely it followed him home. He felt unable to disconnect from the stress even in his down time. If the company couldn’t get a better website launched, their eCommerce presentation would continue to stall the growth and expansion R&R saw for their brand. Not only that, their team members would suffer the continued weight of that stress. 

FINDING AN ECOMMERCE PARTNER WITH FOLLOW-THROUGH

When the R&R team came to Classy Llama, we knew it would be a difficult project, but that didn’t dissuade us from digging in. Delivering what clients need even through storms of difficulty is what lights llamas up, so we rolled up our sleeves and got to work discovering what R&R needed to achieve their goals, and how we could make it happen for them. 

Fitment, UX, and more: Solutions for R&R

Because of the intense level of customization R&R’s M2 Open Source website started with, Classy Llama knew it wouldn’t be a simple process to move them to Adobe Commerce (Magento). Each area of their site that was built with custom code needed to be reviewed and a new—hopefully native to Magento—solution would need to be developed. From shipping to UX to their ERP, Classy Llama began the complicated process of auditing, roadmapping, and implementing each Adobe Commerce integration that would bring R&R’s website from buggy and archaic to functional and technically up-to-date. 

One feature that was intensely important to R&R’s user experience functionality and, therefore, their goals of stellar customer service, was the interactive schematics. This functionality, often referred to as, “Fitment,” is designed to make searching for parts super simple for shoppers and is extremely popular among all kinds of parts sellers. Fortunately, Classy Llama’s extensive experience in the automotive industry and dealing with large catalogs of aftermarket parts made us the team with the technical chops needed to create an excellent fitment search solution for R&R. 

Lawn mower schematics display with all parts showing.
Hover over the part(s) you want to buy, that part lights up in the schematic and vice-versa.

After identifying that the previous SI’s work on the fitment solution would need to be scrapped, Classy Llama’s UX team got to work rebuilding the code from scratch. The team also implemented a functionality that made it possible for customers to save the models of their machinery (ex. lawn mowers) to a personal login so that when they searched, only parts for the models they own would display. 

When customers create an account, they can save their equipment and only shop what they need.
An Ongoing Partnership

After almost two years of working through various problems during the new Adobe Commerce build, the Classy Llama and R&R teams were able to build the kind of trust and connection every brand needs in their eCommerce partner. Shortly before the official launch date, R&R signed on to an ongoing partnership with Classy Llama, to provide post launch support as well as continued maintenance on whatever they need most. 

Not only that, during our ongoing maintenance, the solutions team determined R&R would benefit from an upgrade to their Adobe Commerce site. Classy Llama is now working toward kicking off the upgrade project as soon as possible. 

R&R’S SERVICE PROMISES KEPT

Now that R&R Products, Inc., has an eCommerce partner like Classy Llama on their side, their brand is primed to achieve their growth goals. Plus, their dedication to customer service excellence has the technical back-up necessary to make sure they always keep their promise to their customers. 

PurposeBuilt Brands: 9 Websites. One Shopping Cart. No problem.

A huge product catalog can make a website difficult to navigate, which leads to customers bouncing and, ultimately, a loss of revenue or even a bad reputation. But for a company like PurposeBuilt Brands, with nine huge product catalogs, customer confusion can become an even bigger problem.

THE CLEANING REVOLUTION

Since 1941, the Weiman family has been pioneering a new revolution they like to call, “So much more than clean,” when they started developing their expansive line of cleaning products starting with Weiman Wood Polish. This product was a first-to-the-market of its kind, formulated specially to preserve and protect fine wood furniture.

Since then, Weiman has continued to develop more first-of-a-kind cleaning products, including pioneering glass cooktop cleaner in the 1980s. The Weiman Family’s dedication to creating products that go beyond simply cleaning and instead beautify and fortify people’s belongings led them to develop a diverse portfolio of cleaning product brands. 

What started as Weiman in 1941 is now known as PurposeBuilt Brands, a company passionate about building premium brands that offer safer, gentler, and more sustainable cleaning products: “Our desire is to be better for you, your family, your business, and the environment.”

PurposeBuilt believes in operating with a purpose and passion for creating products that are prized by their users and ultimately better their lives. 

eCOMMERCE STRESS AND STRUGGLES

Because PurposeBuilt Brands is dedicated to continually improving their customer’s lives by adding to their portfolio of exceptional brands, they came to a point as a company where they realized they needed cohesion and improvement in their eCommerce presentation. 

Their previous Magento 2 websites were extremely buggy and overloaded with third-party plugins that made daily site maintenance so difficult and time consuming the upkeep was virtually impossible for the PurposeBuilt team. Because none of their sites were connected, their team had to play a game of debugging whack-a-mole each time Magento went through an update, fixing issues on one site and then checking through code on the other 8 until they could fix each site’s issues. 

Not only that, PurposeBuilt offers a robust library of helpful content available on most of their websites that drives traffic to their eCommerce stores, but their WordPress blog was constantly in danger of going down. Pat Lee, the eCommerce Director for Weiman, and the rest of his team were frequently stressed and worried about the possibility that their number one source of inbound website traffic would be suddenly and unexpectedly non-functional. 

Finally, each PurposeBuilt Brand had its own website and they weren’t connected to each other, causing their customer base to be unaware of the full catalog of quality products available to them. Their eCommerce team wanted to find a technical team with the chops to create a single shopping cart for their current brand portfolio that can scale as they add more brands. 

With their brand’s websites in such a precarious state and the anxiety of potentially losing traffic (and potentially revenue) looming over them each day, the PurposeBuilt team decided it was time to find a solution. 

CONNECTING A VAST BRAND PORTFOLIO

First thing’s first, PurposeBuilt’s team knew they needed a website with a much lower total cost of ownership. 

They began to seek a Solutions Integration partner that could debug their Adobe Commerce Magento 2 sites, reduce custom code, and centralize their website features. Pat at Weiman had worked at a company previously that partnered with Classy Llama and felt that our team was a perfect fit to solve their pain points. 

After an initial discovery period, the Classy Llama team determined making all the necessary improvements to Weiman’s current site would be time- and cost-prohibitive. We determined that, it would actually take less time, money, and effort to rebuild their Adobe Commerce M2 site from scratch. Not only that, a new build would create a website that was much more maintainable for the PurposeBuilt team providing them with the lower total cost of ownership they wanted — and with a lot less stress. 

During the new build, Classy Llama was able to help PurposeBuilt think more holistically about being a multi-brand company. 

A frustration the PurposeBuilt team and their customers alike had was the inability to shop all of the company’s brands at once. Because each brand had its own website, they also had their own shopping cart. But since one company owns all of the brands, wouldn’t it be easer if they somehow had a shared shopping cart between all of the PurposeBuilt brands?

The Classy Llama team said yes, it would, and created a brand switcher that would allow customers to add any product from any PurposeBuilt site and add it to one shopping cart. Not only that, we created a header functionality to make it easy for customers to switch from brand to brand seamlessly while shopping.

Now PurposeBuilt has the benefit of each of their brands having their own website, while also offering their customers the convenience to shop all in one place.

In addition to creating a stable, connected websites site with a single cart, our UX team created themes designed to help centralize branding fonts and colors without creating a cookie-cutter brand expression, given that each of PurposeBuilt’s brands are all distinct. Now their team has the ability to make one change to their pattern library and have it apply across all nine of their websites, or just as easily make a singular change to one of their brands. 

To solve PurposeBuilt’s problems with their WordPress instability, Classy Llama determined that the third-party extension Weiman was using to connect to their blog would not be stable on the Adobe Commerce platform. Instead, our team recommended implementing an Adobe Commerce (Magento) specific extension from MageFan, a hybrid WordPress and Adobe Commerce (Magento) blog solution. As part of this effort, the team was able to migrate a considerable amount of blog data from WordPress to Magento where it could be more easily stabilized and maintained, as well as customizing the blog styling on the blog landing pages to match the rest of their branding themes. 

Now the team at Weiman has stability for their current blog content and what they need to continue to develop an even more robust content library for their customers. 

Classy Llama also bolstered PurposeBuilt’s shipping solutions by making sure their preferred shipping partner ShipStation was still the best tool for their new sites. PurposeBuilt uses ShipStation to let customers track their order shipments through their Magento website.

After a quick audit to validate their choice, the solutions team began to integrate the shipping tool on Magento. During this integration, some unexpected bugs and challenges were discovered, but our technical experts were able to rally together, solve the issues, and get the ShipStation integration up and running. 

FROM CONFUSION TO COHESION

Thanks to the solutions built by Classy Llama, PurposeBuilt Brands now has a stable Adobe Commerce M2 site that’s able to maintain brand differentiation for each product in their portfolio. Not only that, the shopping cart integration allows their shoppers to browse each distinct brand while all of their sites are powered by one shopping cart. 

The ease of use for customers to shop all of PurposeBuilt Brands brought cohesion to their portfolio, allowing the company to better connect with their audience and bring them the high-quality products that they’re passionate about developing. 

PurposeBuilt’s team has been so happy with Classy Llama’s solution, they decided to sign on to an ongoing engagement with us before the build was even complete. Now that the website has launched, our ongoing services team is in place to provide site maintenance, further relieving the team’s stress.

As PurposeBuilt continues to build their brands, they now have a reassurance that they not only have a website that can expand along with their portfolio but also a partner who can help them with that expansion. Recently, Classy Llama developed a new project that kicks off shortly to add three additional product lines to PurposeBuilt’s website suite. 

Since working with Classy Llama, PurposeBuilt now has a stable Adobe Commerce M2 build that features multiple sites in one, cohesive yet distinct branding, and an ongoing maintenance partner in Classy Llama. Now that their team enjoys a better experience for their customers and less daily stress, they’re free to focus on what they love:  Developing more sustainable cleaning brands that can bring value to their customers’ everyday lives.

Maintaining Excellent Customer Service at Scale for R&R Products, Inc.

Sometimes, no matter your best intentions, a project can be laden with difficulties. That was certainly true for the R&R Products, Inc., company in the early stages of their eCommerce journey. 

When the R&R team decided their new goals were to expand from the golf products industry into the landscaping market, all while keeping up their commitment to customer service, they knew they would need a stable website with a great user experience. Unfortunately, they were working with a Solutions Integrator that wasn’t able to handle the complexity of the upgrade their website needed, from M2 Open Source to M2 Commerce Cloud. 

That’s when R&R began their search for an agency partner that had the experience and confidence needed to get into the weeds of coding complexities and also the expertise to pull the project out of those same weeds. 

CUSTOMER SERVICE AND GROWTH GOALS

R&R Products, Inc., is a name that’s synonymous with quality. As the world’s leading manufacturer of turf equipment replacement parts for the commercial turf industry, their dedication to serving the needs of golf courses, athletic fields, and more with high quality products has never wavered since their founding in 1971.

Not only that, despite their catalog featuring over 32,000 quality replacement parts, accessories, and more, their team takes superior customer service so seriously, they proudly offer a 98% rate on products being shipped the same day their order is received. When you order from R&R, you can be assured that not only will you get a quality product, you’ll also get it in a timely fashion. 

Looking to the future, R&R is also pursuing growth into the general landscape industry, hopeful they can bring their brand of quality and service to another market. 

But, with a site that worked directly against these objectives, an update with better functionality wasn’t just wished for—it was an absolute necessity.

BLOCKED BY FAULTY TECH

Standing in the way of the R&R team’s goals was an outdated website that wasn’t functioning at a level commensurate with their commitment to customer service. Their M2 Open Source website contained an abundance of archaic, specialty code, making it slow to load and hard to use. 

Having a stable website with a great user experience is absolutely crucial to R&R Products’ mission that every shopper gets the same excellent customer service every time they visit their website. 

Unfortunately, the complex fixes that would be needed weren’t achievable with the SI they were currently working with. Facing frustrated customers and internal team woes as well, Brian Larson from R&R felt the pressure to fix their eCommerce presentation so acutely it followed him home. He felt unable to disconnect from the stress even in his down time. If the company couldn’t get a better website launched, their eCommerce presentation would continue to stall the growth and expansion R&R saw for their brand. Not only that, their team members would suffer the continued weight of that stress. 

FINDING AN ECOMMERCE PARTNER WITH FOLLOW-THROUGH

When the R&R team came to Classy Llama, we knew it would be a difficult project, but that didn’t dissuade us from digging in. Delivering what clients need even through storms of difficulty is what lights llamas up, so we rolled up our sleeves and got to work discovering what R&R needed to achieve their goals, and how we could make it happen for them. 

Fitment, UX, and more: Solutions for R&R

Because of the intense level of customization R&R’s M2 Open Source website started with, Classy Llama knew it wouldn’t be a simple process to move them to Adobe Commerce (Magento). Each area of their site that was built with custom code needed to be reviewed and a new—hopefully native to Magento—solution would need to be developed. From shipping to UX to their ERP, Classy Llama began the complicated process of auditing, roadmapping, and implementing each Adobe Commerce integration that would bring R&R’s website from buggy and archaic to functional and technically up-to-date. 

One feature that was intensely important to R&R’s user experience functionality and, therefore, their goals of stellar customer service, was the interactive schematics. This functionality, often referred to as, “Fitment,” is designed to make searching for parts super simple for shoppers and is extremely popular among all kinds of parts sellers. Fortunately, Classy Llama’s extensive experience in the automotive industry and dealing with large catalogs of aftermarket parts made us the team with the technical chops needed to create an excellent fitment search solution for R&R. 

After identifying that the previous SI’s work on the fitment solution would need to be scrapped, Classy Llama’s UX team got to work rebuilding the code from scratch. The team also implemented a functionality that made it possible for customers to save the models of their machinery (ex. lawn mowers) to a personal login so that when they searched, only parts for the models they own would display. 

An Ongoing Partnership

After almost two years of working through various problems during the new Adobe Commerce build, the Classy Llama and R&R teams were able to build the kind of trust and connection every brand needs in their eCommerce partner. Shortly before the official launch date, R&R signed on to an ongoing partnership with Classy Llama, to provide post launch support as well as continued maintenance on whatever they need most. 

Not only that, during our ongoing maintenance, the solutions team determined R&R would benefit from an upgrade to their Adobe Commerce site. Classy Llama is now working toward kicking off the upgrade project as soon as possible. 

R&R’S SERVICE PROMISES KEPT

Now that R&R Products, Inc., has an eCommerce partner like Classy Llama on their side, their brand is primed to achieve their growth goals. Plus, their dedication to customer service excellence has the technical back-up necessary to make sure they always keep their promise to their customers. 

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