call center / online community
We serve all 50 states through our website and our call center. Together they’ve made us a national leader in green building supplies, and maintaining their outstanding quality is one of our top priorities. They’re not sidelines for us, they’re stores – stores where you can get everything you need by clicking a mouse or picking up the phone.
Our website is brand new, with tools and information to make your online shopping experience satisfying and easy. You’ll find a huge selection of products and a simple checkout process, along with a wealth of decorating ideas and forthright information about the health and environmental effects of everything we sell. Through our online community you can communicate with other customers, or tell us about the creative ways you’ve used our materials.
Our call center is based at our flagship store in Seattle, right next to the showroom. You won’t get a telemarketer in some off-site location when you call our toll-free number. Our call center professionals are highly trained, and they have extensive knowledge about each of our products.
They can quickly help you understand your options and pinpoint what you like. Even big-ticket items such as carpet are no problem: our experts will help you select a manageable number of samples to see and touch.
The website works hand-in-hand with the call center. You can use either resource by itself, or take advantage of both. No matter which you choose, we’re in your neighborhood. So pull up an easy chair and shop with us. Our store is just a click or a call away.
Call Center History
Our call center opened in 2000, and our first e-commerce site launched a few months later. It proved to be a dynamic combination that has made ecohaus a leading national retailer of green building materials.
Our first website was a single page created in the pre-dot-com era by our founder, Matt Freeman-Gleason. It provided basic information about EnviResource, the “earth-wise general store” that Freeman-Gleason and his wife, Alison, opened in Bainbridge Island in 1991. There was no call center in those days; EnviResource had one phone line.
When the Freeman-Gleasons moved the business to Seattle and opened Environmental Home Center, there were 12 phones, but all of them rang at the same time. “A call would come in and everyone in the store would pick up the phone at once,” Freeman-Gleason recalls. Convinced that providing information is crucial to selling sustainable products, he bought a used phone system with six lines so customers could call and ask questions.
In 2000, Tim Taylor came aboard as EHC’s Chief Executive Officer and made it a priority to build a first-rate e-commerce site. With its website, Environmental Home Center positioned itself as a national resource for green building materials and an authoritative source of information on the subject. It won awards for its thorough, straightforward presentation of the complex issues surrounding sustainability. The site’s inaugural home page announced, “We want to be a catalyst in transforming the built environment, and we believe the way to accomplish this is to innovate and lead with a company built on honesty, integrity and social responsibility.”
The call center worked in tandem with the website to provide customers with a context to help them evaluate and choose green building materials. A powerful “feedback loop” developed between the two: website customers would call with questions about what they saw, which helped to refine the online presentation; call-center customers could be referred to the website to see the products.
When a fire destroyed Environmental Home Center’s showroom and offices in 2004, the call center became indispensable. All the phones had burned up, so call-center manager Jeremy Kanyo arranged for the phone company to forward EHC’s number to a chain of cell phones. All of our sales staff gathered in one room and worked the call center. Though EHC had no showroom for five months, the company achieved record sales.
When Environmental Home Center became ecohaus, the new corporation’s goal was to establish a website that would streamline the process of shopping for green building materials and make information more accessible. The new site was launched in August of 2008, and it’s continually refined and updated to make the online shopping experience more satisfying.
We welcome you to our Internet store. If you’d like to chat about what you find here, just give us a call.