How do packers and movers charge?

It’s the stuff of startup lore. Fresh out of college, co-founders Leor Lapid and Matthew Grossman set up shop in a garage, Professional Movers dubai determined to figure out how they could offer summer storage and shipping services to college students at Arizona State University and The University of Arizona. It was a need they’d identified firsthand as out-of-state students, wondering where to put their stuff when they went home on summer breaks.

In their first year, Dorm Room Movers moved 216 students. But Lapid and Grossman were doing too many things themselves and quickly realized they needed to partner with professional, licensed, and experienced moving and storage companies in order to scale into a real business. 

Nearly a decade later, they’ve built out a vast infrastructure that has supported more than 25,000 student moves across 165 colleges and universities. To date, their network of partners has moved more than 160,000 boxes. Meanwhile, Lapid and Grossman have learned a lot about all aspects of running an on-demand business. From the beginning, they knew they wanted technology to be the drumbeat behind their business, differentiating them in an industry that hasn’t changed much over time and they began looking for ways to integrate innovative SaaS tools wherever possible. Two years in, they began using the Zendesk family of products to manage their customer relationships—though not so robustly as they do today.

Full-service support through seasonal spikes

Since Dorm Room Movers is aligned to the academic year, Office movers dubai, the pressure is on to run lean. Year-round, a team of 7 answers emails, phone calls, and live chats. The core team might handle an average of 250 inbound calls in February, but by April they’ll field as many as 25,000 calls which is why, during peak periods, the support team leans on a remote call center and scales to as many as 30 agents.

Despite the influx, the support team is committed to providing multi-channel support. “I can’t stand it when I go to a website and need help and have only one option,” Grossman admitted.

Bringing phone support ‘in house’

As their support offerings matured, Grossman found that having a separate system for phone support made it especially difficult to keep up with growth and seasonal changes. “Prior to integrating all our channels into Zendesk we had a lot of disconnected data sets”, he explained. “I would be up until two or three in the morning, spending hours trying to match up data from different platforms.”

Shortly after the launch of Advanced Talk from Zendesk in December 2015, Grossman and his team switched from InContact, a move Grossman describes as a “game-changer”. “By bringing email, chat, phone, and even SMS into one platform,” he said, “we are able to tie these data sets together and get actionable insights into where our problems are in real-time.”

By integrating all channels into Zendesk, International movers Dubai, the support team spends less time moving between platforms and is more efficient and focused. Grossman estimates that the team has seen a 15 percent increase in agent productivity since the move to Talk.

And because Talk is easy to use, agents ramped up a lot quicker, too. “Integrating all our support channels, especially phone support with Zendesk Talk has been empowering,” Grossman said.

Innovation on a budget

Now that Dorm Room Movers has all their support channels in one place, Grossman set his sights on other ways to improve the customer experience and increase operational efficiencies. Grossman and his team thought through the various tools they needed and evaluated the value they were seeing from each tool. They began with Infusion Soft, the CRM they used to manage leads. The cost seemed high, and they’d always been resourceful.

A self-proclaimed tinkerer, Grossman dove in to figure out how his team could use Zendesk for lead tracking instead. By upgrading their Support to the Enterprise plan, and building out custom forms, he discovered that he could begin collecting new opportunity data in tickets through live chat and web forms. Today, if you request a quote, that information runs through Zendesk and is funneled into a special agent view, with a dedicated SLA. Agents are then prompted to call back prospects using Talk.

Shipping off to space

With the operational efficiencies and insights into their business that Zendesk has made possible, Moving companies dubai, Grossman, and his partner are able to explore new opportunities and confidently take on new challenges. Just over a year ago, they launched a new brand.