Canadian Tire is one of Canada's most recognized retailers, and a go-to destination for home decor, outdoor living products, fitness and sports equipment, tools, and more. With over 570 franchised stores across Canada, efficient communication is critical to keep the vast ecosystem running smoothly.
Challenge
Canadian Tire's dealers rely on fast support to facilitate smooth daily operations. The store operations team, including Gina D., Manager of Network Performance Support and Adoption, assists the full network of stores with everything from general queries and recall notifications to critical data intelligence and technical support.
Before Emailgistics, supporting over 570 dealers through Outlook distribution groups left the team exposed. Emails landed in a common pool managed by three people, but there was no clear owner, no tracking, and no way to triage by urgency or topic. Hiring new team members would have only made things worse — adding more people without a system meant even less clarity about who was handling which requests.
"How long has it been? What's open? What's closed? With no means of tracking, it felt like sending emails into a black hole and hoping someone would answer." Gina D., Manager of Network Performance Support and Adoption
Without visibility, managers couldn't prioritize urgent dealer problems, measure performance, or coach their teams. To protect dealer trust and scale effectively, Canadian Tire needed a way to bring structure, accountability, and real-time oversight to shared mailboxes.
Solution
Canadian Tire adopted Emailgistics to bring structure and accountability to shared mailboxes while keeping Outlook as the team's central workspace. The store operations team customized the platform to reflect the realities of dealer support — configuring templates, categories, and workflows that now underpin how the team manages, prioritizes, and reports on every dealer request.
Clear Ownership for Every Message
Before, messages lived in a shared pool. Now, each email is explicitly and automatically assigned to a named owner inside the existing Outlook workflow. That simple shift replaces "Is anyone on this?" with clear accountability and handoffs when needed.
"Once a message is triaged, it gets assigned to personal mailboxes. Each team member has them pinned, and they can get instantly alerted when something new has been assigned. If they send an email, replies go directly to the person who sent it, so we don't need to re-triage the message and figure out who worked on it last." Gina D.
Smarter Triage with Tags and Workflows
The store operations team set up 48 tags spanning message type, urgency, and workflow stage. For example, emails related to Canadian Tire's ERP system are assigned a specific tag, and sub-tags indicate the type of request: access issues, parameter issues, troubleshooting, etc.
Templates and snooze features further streamline responses, pausing SLAs when waiting on SMEs and speeding up common replies.
"I'm answering emails faster because I'm using templates instead of typing the same message 80+ times. So we almost always meet our SLAs, even during high-volume periods." Frances T., Senior Consultant, Network Performance and Support
Visibility and Reporting That Drive Improvement
Dashboards and SLA monitoring provide a live view of response times, workloads, and bottlenecks. Ready insights let managers rebalance workloads, coach their teams more effectively, and anticipate issues before they escalate.
"Every week, we report on how many dealers are reaching out to us and why. This helps us spot trends and understand the volume and severity of an issue. Then, if we need to, we can drill into individual messages and read the back-and-forth correspondence and see how we resolved it. The ability to go from high to low is incredible." Gina D.
Results
With Emailgistics, performance is no longer a guessing game. Response times for each team member are tracked, giving managers clear visibility into workloads and coaching opportunities. Average response times have dropped to just over 3 hours against a 48-hour SLA target — 93% faster. Today, 99% of responses fall within SLA.
"Our response time floats around the 3-hour mark, which is amazing and well-exceeds our 48-hour turnaround goals." Gina D.
The transformation has given Canadian Tire both speed and scale. What once would have struggled under added headcount is now a structured system where twelve people work seamlessly together. Dealers benefit from quicker answers and more reliable support, while managers gain confidence that the team can keep scaling without sacrificing performance.
"Emailgistics gives me the insight to manage both our dealer service and my team. Because everything is tracked at the individual level, I can coach with facts in front of me — response times, trends, strengths, and areas to improve." Gina D.
"Now we can hire more people to support our dealers, and they know the role they play because Emailgistics makes our shared inboxes much more organized. That's huge from a scalability perspective." Gina D.
In the end, better dealer service strengthens the network — and the business.
