How Floranow is Maximizing Customer Delight With Locus

The UAE-based B2B floral marketplace is able to scale their last-mile flower delivery operations with a 99% on-time delivery rate, and bring a new level of customizability to buyers’ experience

Having grown up in a family in the floral industry, Charif Mzayek was acutely aware of the challenges of both flower growers and buyers: long and inefficient supply chains that increase costs and impact product quality, price volatility, and a lack of transparency being some of the hardest to tackle.

He also saw a need to expand the product selection for buyers and the growers’ access to other markets. Another key challenge was equitable pay: buyers ended up paying more and growers ended up getting less for their crops due to an ineffective and obsolete supply chain. With a passion and desire to resolve all this and more, he founded Floranow in 2016.

Based in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Floranow is an online B2B floral marketplace that connects buyers to growers from across the world, including Holland, Kenya, Thailand, Columbia and China. Their mission is to ensure direct, transparent and efficient transactions between growers and buyers while optimizing the cold chain to ensure the freshest quality of products to all stakeholders.

Digitalizing the last-mile to bring 99.5% on-time delivery rates

The buyers that Floranow caters to are currently based in the GCC and Jordan. Given that last-mile accounts for close to 50% of all shipping costs, it was essential to get this right to ensure timeliness of delivery, maintain the freshness of the product, and keep operating costs in check.

Initially, the team at Floranow would manage all last-mile fulfillment, from the distribution center to the customer’s doorstep, manually through spreadsheets. This included everything from capturing of orders to assigning them to drivers and creating routes.

Over time, the team realized that scaling up operations would require digitalizing their fulfillment in an end-to-end manner. And one of their topmost priorities was a route planning solution.

When working with a last-mile solutions provider, they realized that they needed more solutions that added transparency and greater insights to improve their last-mile. They found all that they needed with Locus. As of today, Locus’ Route Planning feature has enabled Floranow to achieve a 99.5% delivery rate, up from 70% prior to Locus, even as they continue to grow in scale.

Ensuring quality and new levels of consumer delight with technology

According to Jibu, IT Lead at Floranow, Locus Dispatch Management Platform also vastly improves on the customer experience because of its ability to work with real-time data.

“If one task is delayed, either due to traffic blocks or any other reason, the estimated time of the next delivery is automatically updated for more accurate ETAs for our customers’ deliveries in real-time. This is what we love most about working with Locus.”

Jibu recounted that earlier, procurement representatives of their clients would call to place their orders, and then constantly follow up with them to prioritize their deliveries. After onboarding Locus Dispatch Management Platform, the team at Floranow was able to overcome challenges by offering deliveries based on customer preferences, something that was lacking with their previous solution provider. Customers could now place their orders with the click of a button and receive updates about their shipments in real-time.

One their biggest achievements in maximizing customer delight is by providing same-day express delivery with the help of the platform. “For example: all orders placed between 8-12 p.m. will be delivered between 1-3 p.m. We are able to provide these windows with Locus. We can simply upload our tasks on the platform, making it really simple for scheduling and routing delivery.”

With these capabilities, Floranow now aims to expand its presence across key GCC markets as a leading B2B floral marketplace.

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