Starting in May – We’re Closed on Sunday – Kinda…

At iFLOOR we have been a 24 hour – seven day per week – organization for years. We have only closed only for brief windows of 3-8 hours during the high holidays.

Even at the local stores we are often open Sundays and extended evening hours to try and accommodate our customer’s busy schedules. There are only a couple holidays that we take the day off for.

From time to time as a company we struggle to balance our desire to serve our customer with our own personal lives, families and commitments and to be honest there can be conflict.

We aspire to be wherever our customer needs us; WHENever they need us. That can be taxing on our families and our other interests beyond our work lives. Although personally I can’t imagine why anyone needs a side interest when you already have flooring, but I digress. 😉

So this past week during our quarterly review meetings the field leaders of the store chain came forward and said, “Hey, we’d like to be off on Sunday. It’s better for us, our people, our families and long term it will be better for our business and our customers. And to help offset the customer impact we’ll stay open a bit longer in the evenings where we need to.”

I applaud the courage that it took to even bring up this topic when the most obvious point of resistance would be the potentially a lower service level to our customers and lost sales.

Further I salute the senior leadership team responsible for the store operations who just after hearing the idea quickly internalized this concept and then became advocates in favor of it too.

So they made a decision. And I stand with them. They chose to do the right thing for our people.

I am pleased to report that, starting in May, we are going to experiment with the concept of being closed on Sundays in local stores and warehouses. We will be adding some more evening hours in some regions to make sure we are still as accessible as possible. We will maintain the 24/7 coverage on iFLOOR.com automated online order tracking system, Live Chat and our telephones to make sure we are balancing the high service level our customers expect and deserve.

To be honest, it is a risk. Sometimes doing the right thing is a risk, but it is the right thing to do for our people and their families. I believe it will result in a higher service level for our customers in the long run too.

I am confident that our customers will understand this choice and embrace the personal aspect of this choice as it relates to our staff and their families.

Furthermore I also believe that the commitments from our online group to hold the line on maintaining super high service levels will offset any inconvenience found as a result of this decision. Customers will be able to call our toll free line, engage a live chat or use our online ordering or tracking system on Sunday or other off times.

So although we reserve the right to be wrong and make appropriate alterations in the future I feel this is the right thing to do and I couldn’t be more proud of the leadership for making it happen.