Fallon's Home & HearthHelping Families Stay Warm, Safe, and ConnectedHow AI Kept a Hearth Retailer's Busiest Season Under Control
A family-owned hearth retailer modernized scheduling and customer service, improving delivery planning, responding to customers faster, and freeing staff for the showroom.
At a glance
- Family-owned since 1979
- Hampton Falls, New Hampshire
- fallonshomeandhearth.com
- Industry: Hearth Retail
Success Highlights
- 80–90% reduction in delivery scheduling time at peak
- Pellet customers get answers the moment they call, day or night
Challenge
Fallon's Home & Hearth, a family-owned retailer on the New Hampshire Seacoast since 1979, sells and services fireplaces and stoves and delivers wood pellets and firewood across three states. New England winters bring the year's heaviest demand in a matter of weeks, and the busier the store gets, the harder it is to give customers the time they came in for.
Existing approaches could not keep up with peak demand:
- Disconnected systems kept orders, inventory and the truck schedule in separate applications, so planning meant reconciling them by hand.
- Manual scheduling relied on route, capacity and customer requests tracked from memory.
- Unanswered calls reached staff who were serving in-store customers, or went to voicemail and waited for a callback.
- Slow confirmations of delivery windows meant callbacks and last-minute changes.
The business needed to keep up with peak demand without pulling people away from customers, with fewer manual steps and faster answers on the phone.
Solution
To address these challenges, Fallon's worked with The AI Operators (AIO) to build an AI operating layer across the business, connecting the systems already in place, automating routine coordination, and getting answers to customers and staff faster.
Connected Systems
- Integrates the ERP and inventory system (MTP), the delivery planning board (Airtable), the phone system (Cytracom) and the voice AI platform (Retell AI).
- Enabled through custom Claude connectors and skills for delivery schedule management and data reconciliation across systems.
Intelligent Planning
- Builds each week's delivery plan around capacity, route, inventory and customer commitments.
- One review and approval replaces hours of manual entry and cross-checking.
Customer Response
- An AI-enabled voice agent, Grace, answers product, pricing, delivery and hours questions day or night.
- She confirms delivery windows, transfers to staff with a handoff summary, and takes detailed callback notes.
Fallon's kept the systems it already ran on. AIO connected them and put AI to work across the business.
Outcomes
The impact reached both the back office and the front counter:
- 80–90% less time spent scheduling deliveriesBuilding the week's delivery schedule took 10 hours a week. It now takes one to two.
- Instant answers, day or nightPellet customers can get product, pricing and delivery answers whenever they call.
- Showroom customers come firstRoutine calls are handled, so the customer standing in the showroom has the associate's full attention.
- Reduced sales leakageCallback and order details are captured from calls that once went to voicemail.
Working with the AI Operators has been a tremendous advantage for my company. Every week we take away a little more of the time consuming and redundant tasks associated with running a retail and service business, and now we have more time to work on it, instead of in it!
The owner's time went back to his business and his customers, the team is more connected with the people it serves, and the service department will soon have its own AI voice agent support. Like a dedicated teammate always finding new ways to contribute, Grace has grown into her role, taking on more of the work behind the counter as well as on the phone, earning more trust, and becoming an integral part of how Fallon's takes care of its customers.