CRST Delivers on the Last Mile

Changes in buying habits for consumers accelerated dramatically during the pandemic. Depending on whose statistics you believe, e-commerce sales grew by as much as 40% in 2020. According to Forrester, e-commerce sales are expected to account for 16% of U.S. retail sales by 2022. The last mile market is predicted to grow by $59.81 billion between now and 2025, according to ResearchAndMarkets.com.

Last mile is defined as the point from a transportation hub to the package’s final delivery destination, typically to a home or personal residence.  It is characterized by fast delivery, precise order tracking, security, and convenience.

One company that has success in the home solutions (last mile segment) is CRST. The company draws off the rich history of North American Van Lines from which it was spun off. Delivering “big and bulky” items is part of CRST’s rich history and it also has a nationwide LTL network which it leverages in the home solutions segment. You could say that specialized delivery is in CRST’s DNA. This allowed the company to easily transfer lessons learned from its experience in the traditional specialized side of trucking to the fast-growing home solutions business. Clearly the final mile segment of trucking is not new to the company, but today CRST has become one of the more significant players in that market.

What makes the home solutions market challenging is that customers have expectations surrounding having as a seamless experience. This means the receive a sufficient amount of communication — but not an immense amount — about the status of their order. In order to meet these customer expectations, CRST tries to be seamless so that it appears as if one day you do not have a washer and dryer and the next day you do.

Final mile can be a challenge for a trucking company because there can be several hand-offs of the ordered goods. With true final mile, a company just does the delivery from the local store, local cross dock or local distribution center of the retailer or e-commerce site. The trucking company doing the final mile delivery may not have visibility into the order’s status prior to picking it up and so can only notify the customer about delivery time once it has the item on its truck.  Along with visibility into shipments, customers have also come to expect that items will be delivered when promised. Therefore, on-time delivery has a high value to these customers, which is something CRST respects and it strives to make its delivery windows each and every time.

Another challenge of the home solutions market is that drivers not only interact with people at distribution center — which is something most truck drivers do routinely — but they also have to be able to communicate effectively with end-user customers. This means it takes a person with a unique combination of driving skills and interpersonal skills to operate in this application. In addition, many of CRST drivers also handle the installation of these products. However, the company has been able to find people with the right skill sets to handle the rigors of this demanding market segment.

Since CRST is already running a separate high-value product delivery network everywhere in the country, it can leverage those assets for its home delivery operation. As a result, it is able to deliver in all 42,000 zips codes in the U.S. Today it runs 500 trucks in that division. All the trucks are new and the company experiences few, if any, equipment breakdowns as a result which helps ensure those on-time deliveries.

Consumer durables —in other words, big and bulky items, often items that require two people to handle and a truck with a liftgate — is the niche CRST excels in. This includes washers, dryers, dishwashers, big screen TVs, home fitness equipment, furniture, beds The company’s home delivery operation does not handle parcel freight — the smaller items that are typically handled by UPS and FedEx.

Home solutions/final mile is an area that will continue to grow and CRST sees enormous capacity in this market for growing its business and offering final mile delivery to many more customers in the future.

CRST is unique among home solution operators in that it is one of the largest trucking companies in the U.S. that was running independent trucking companies. Over the last 18 months, CRST has brough those separate operations together under one CRST umbrella. This allows it to go to larger shippers and offer all the capabilities and requirements in the logistics space. It has one of the largest expedited fleets, a sizeable dedicated division — which continue to grow as more and more shippers convert away from private fleets — flat bed capability and an integrated solutions offering, which is essentially a brokerage operation.

It also has unique capability with the high-value product side of trucking because it runs both a direct fleet and a nationwide LTL network, and, of course, it has the final mile operation.

This broad offering allows CRST to meet the needs of larger shippers and to interact with them as an enterprise with various capabilities while maintaining the subject matter expertise of the individual operating businesses.

CRST The Transportation Solution, Inc. is one of the nation’s largest privately held transportation companies and has been working hard since 1955 to deliver superior service. The effort to bring together a multitude of services under our enterprise offerings makes CRST THE transportation solution of choice for both our customers and our drivers. We tailor each solution to ensure we deliver promises and drive success.

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