Tech talk, with Ashby Lumber
With locations on opposite sides of the San Francisco Bay in Berkeley and Concord, California, Ashby Lumber operates in the shadows of tech industry royalty. Brian Rocha, vice president of sales and marketing for the prodealer, says he can’t directly trace Ashby’s embrace of technology to the local business culture. But it certainly doesn’t hurt.
Rocha spoke with HBSDealer on a number of tech-related topics:
On an e-commerce initiative: We switched providers recently from an iNet service to Toolbx, which is a startup company and an e-commerce platform in the building products space. And if you look at lumber yards in general (at least in our neck of the woods) the online services are pretty limited. Pricing, ability to purchase online — a lot of independent dealers can’t do that. So we felt here was an opportunity for us to have a leg up on the competition, and expand our business beyond just the local footprint. It will allow customers to shop with us outside of our radius, and keep us ahead of the curve.
We’ve already seen positive traction. Our online engagement has increased significantly. We’re getting a lot more phone calls, a lot more online quote requests. So it has had its benefits for sure.
We’ve also invested in a full-fledged marketing program this year. So, we’re doing paid digital, we’re running promotions every month. And that’s also been a big part of the increase in business online.
On choosing technology vendors: It’s an ever-changing world. We want to hear about how a vendor partner is going to improve or help our business today. But I also want to know that tomorrow is part of the thought process, too. And I feel like that’s where some of the software firms that we’ve dealt with in the past, that’s where they’ve failed. Some have built monstrous platforms, and then they abandoned them because they’re too hard to update.
On the potential of artificial intelligence: ChatGPT is the most popular AI out there, and they’ve improved their program a ton. Last year when you first started using it, it was able to help write emails and marketing copy and things like that, but it wasn’t giving you current information. Now they’ve updated the plugins. Now you have web search features. You have more data-analysis features, and that’s really what I think has made that more useful to us.
We’ve built a bot inside of ChatGPT that’s geared towards building materials search—It’s a search engine for building materials essentially. So our salespeople ideally could use this when they’re engaging with the customer. If they get a question they’re not able to answer, they can punch it into our bot. And then our bot can scrape the internet for information that would be useful to our salesperson in helping a customer.
Technology and the brain drain: In this industry right now, we’re seeing a lot of experience that has been built up over the years leave the field. And the next generation isn’t quite filling that space as effectively.
The result is a gap in information and knowledge that’s just not transitioning over to the next generation. So we’re forced to use technology to get that next generation up to speed. And that’s where I feel artificial intelligence is a good tool.
It’s still so new. I believe there's going to be an opportunity for us to really invest in it, and I feel like that’s going to come in the customer-engagement end, but I’m just not quite there yet. I haven’t found the right company or software yet that’s going to be able to provide what we want—a seamless conversation with the customer, just like a person.
