Challenge
A team buried in lookups
For Quality Distribution's customer service team, a normal day meant a steady stream of the same questions. Clients wanted to know where an order was, what their stock levels looked like, whether inventory was on hand. Each answer meant a rep going into the platform to look it up, research it, or pull a report.
The load was uneven. Quality serves more than 100 clients, from large customers with sophisticated API and EDI integrations to smaller accounts that operate manually, and its fifteen customer experience managers sit in the middle of all of it. Tenure ranged from new hires to people approaching ten years, so the depth of platform knowledge varied widely across the team. New reps faced a long ramp, and when someone hit a wall, the question usually rolled up to one of a few internal experts. As CEO Steve Bohin describes it, an account manager could spend an hour trying to figure out a single answer.
"What else can we do to make the experience for our customers, and for our internal customer service team, much more efficient?" Bohin says. That was the standing question before Extensiv AI.
Solution
Answers in seconds, inside the system
Quality started with the questions that used to slow the team down most: how to do things in the platform. Extensiv AI works inside the company's live warehouse data and support documentation, so a rep can ask a question in plain language and get an answer back immediately.
Parker Balle, who oversees Quality's use of Extensiv, felt the difference right away. "Things that generally took me a good amount of time to research, I was able to get answers within seconds, which was huge," he says. When a new client needed small parcel shipping, an area Balle hadn't worked in for a while, he used Extensiv AI to get up to speed on the process quickly, then carried that confidence into how he set the operation up.
From there, the team widened how it used the tool. With fifteen service reps at very different levels of experience, Extensiv AI gave everyone the same fast path to an answer, leveling out the knowledge gap that used to depend on who had been there longest. The team also moved into operational data questions, asking Extensiv AI about stock levels and order status pulled straight from live operations rather than digging through the platform by hand.
Quality is extending that same self-service access to its own clients. Some of its longer-standing customers are already using it to look up stock levels and order status themselves, instead of routing every question through a rep.
Results
Time back to the team
The most immediate change has been the questions that stop coming. Work that used to land on Quality's internal experts now gets resolved at the source, and the constant stream of calls to senior staff has thinned out. "I probably get a lot more phone calls" without it, Balle says.
A team that levels up faster
Instead of sending new hires through a stack of documents to learn the platform, Quality lets them learn as they go, asking Extensiv AI the question in front of them. That has shortened the ramp for new reps and raised the floor for the whole team, regardless of tenure.
From reactive to proactive
Bohin sees the bigger shift in what his team is now free to do. "It allows us to elevate our customer service team to a different level," he says. "We're going to expect our customer service people to be more customer service instead of administrative." With fewer routine lookups in the way, reps can spend their time on the relationship: asking clients about their forecasts and opening conversations about more business. Quality has gone as far as renaming the function from customer service to customer experience. "We're having record results this year," Bohin says.
A long-game partnership
For Bohin, the value sits on top of a relationship that goes back years. He points to what he calls the two R's. "Relationship and reputation are very important to us," he says, and Extensiv has earned a place in both: a stable, secure platform; a team that takes ownership when something needs solving; and a culture that mirrors Quality's own. "We want you to succeed so that we can succeed."
Advice for 3PLs
Bohin's advice for other operators is to move early and get hands-on. "The faster we embrace this, the more competitive advantage we're going to have," he says. Start with the low-hanging fruit, the everyday questions where an answer in seconds replaces a manual lookup, and build from there. The value compounds once a team commits to using it.
Balle puts the whole thing in a sentence. "It's an impactful tool that is easy to use, that provides quick value."
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