Work Glove or White Glove?

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Despite high unemployment and concerns about the economic future, white glove delivery services are thriving. Americans, faced with high local prices, are turning increasingly to e-commerce, even for the big-ticket items like fine furniture and plasma TVs. Retailers, in turn, are looking for ways to add value. White glove delivery, especially for heavy goods, is an increasingly viable solution.

While final mile delivery service brings the product to a customer’s door, white glove services takes that several steps further. At that level of service, delivery personnel often don booties and white gloves, or put carpet runners in place, unpack the merchandise, situate the merchandise in its destination room, install it, ensure that it is working, and remove the packaging as well as the old merchandise. Even the tape from inside refrigerators is removed.

Today, integrated service is fast becoming the hallmark of white glove delivery services, as retailers have determined that getting merchandise to the door, or even into the right room, isn’t enough to win repeat customers. As Will O’Shea, chief sales and marketing officer for 3PD, elaborates, “Delivery and installation used to be two separate events.”

Today’s white glove delivery combines the two. Some of the integrated service providers, like 3PD in Marietta, Georgia, even offer a complex assembly service, assembling massage chairs or installing dishwashers, for example. That requires trucks to stock a basic tool kit as well as common connectors like valves for waterlines and electrical plugs for dishwashers. 3PD also touches up any furniture damage before delivery and talks owners through the basic operating instructions for large electronics purchases. “We certify (our installers) for appliances,” says O’Shea, and send rookies out with experienced teams to learn the fine points of exceptional customer service.

 

Read more about heavy duty gloves