Today,
Coast has 19 divisions stretching across both the
United States and Canada.
Jeff’s
history with Coast gives him a solid understanding of
the Coast philosophy which he helped develop, but his
roots in the industry go further back than that. Born
in Oaksville, Ontario, just outside of Toronto,
Canada, Jeff literally grew up around the RV
industry. His father, Gerald Wannamaker, was former
president of the Dometic Corporation and is now
executive vice president of Kit Manu-facturing. .
"I’ve
been around the industry my entire life," he
said. "My father started Dometic in Canada in
1971 and was president of Dometic Canada for a number
of years before moving to the states in the early
1980s to become president of Dometic in the U.S.
"We
have a close relationship. He has a lot of knowledge
in the business — sometimes that’s a
valuable resource to have."
And Jeff
Wannamaker needs all the resources he can muster. He
steps in as president of Coast Distribution following
a year that saw the company’s sales drop by $25
million and profits disappear. The major factor in
those results was the loss of Dometic
Corporation’s business, which made up 24 percent
of Coast’s sales the previous year. And as one
might expect, there is resentment over Dometic’s
decision to sell dealer direct rather than through
two-step distribution. Dometic’s decision came
as a surprise to Coast, according to Wannamaker.
He said,
"When we first found out about it, yes, it was a
complete surprise for a couple of reasons. One is
that to my knowledge, there had never been any
discussions that they were considering going dealer
direct; and two, we had a contract. You don’t
normally assume that your partner is about to break a
contract. So yes, it came as a surprise. And Dometic
was a large part of our business.
"Like
all partnerships, you have your ups and downs, but I
can say that if you take our volume with Dometic in
the beginning of our contract and our volume with
Dometic at the end of our contract, there was
tremendous growth through that whole time.
"However,
looking at it today, what we would say is: Okay,
that’s great. We grew it to 24 percent of our
business. We don’t want to diminish it, but what
we need to do is emphasize other products to make
them more important too — you don’t want to
be that reliant on one supplier."
Wannamaker
believes the best way to overcome the loss of that
business and generate new business is to provide a
higher level of customer service. Right now
Coast’s order fill rate is running about 92 or
93 percent, but Jeff hopes to improve that too.
Coast
has demonstrated that it believes in technology and
has lead the way in helping dealers computerize their
businesses. That has brought greater efficiency and
lower overhead because dealers can order products
electronically. And reducing the cost of distribution
has been one of Coast’s goals in their campaign
to keep its customer competitive with other channels
such as mass merchandisers. One of Coast’s
latest innovations in technology was consolidating
its 19 regional warehouses’ order desks into two
national order desks. All orders from North America,
with the exception of the French speaking order desk
in Quebec, Canada, are handled at the national order
desk in San Jose, CA. According to Wanna-maker,
Coast’s goal was to improve customer service
while doing it more efficiently.
 |
Coast’s
national order desk can handle 6,000 dealer
calls
a day, and is open six days a week to take
dealers’ calls. |
From his
office Wannamaker can monitor the traffic at the
national order desk and get a second-to-second status
of the number of customer calls and how efficiently
the calls are being handled. The day RV News visited
Wannamaker, Coast’s national order desk handled
3,600 calls from dealers. During peak season, calls
will soar to as many as 6,000 calls a day. The
department is separated into cells with five customer
service representatives to a cell. During peak
season, Coast has the capacity for 65 people in its
customer service department including the people
doing special orders. One manager supervises two
cells.
Jeff
said, "Each supervisor works on training their
customer service reps and monitoring calls.
They’re obviously the first line of problem
solving once it escalates beyond what the customer
service rep is able handle. If the cell supervisor
cannot solve the problem, it goes to the call center
manager and then beyond that, to Randy Carpenter, our
vice president of customer service." Continued
