Dorm Room Movers scales and optimizes support for a digital generation

Moving day can be stressful for students and parents alike. Dorm Room Movers aims to alleviate some of the pressure by offering a hassle-free, one-stop solution for shipping, summer storage, and moving. Since its start in 2007, the Arizona US-based business has gained the trust of more than 130 schools and completed over 100,000 student moves.

Meeting service expectations of digital natives

As demand for its services grew, Dorm Room Movers needed a faster and better way to connect with its mobile-savvy customers; in particular, millennials and Gen Z. The ideal solution was mobile messaging.

But at the time, the customer support system consisted of separate apps for email, phone, and chat. To manage messages, agents toggled between dashboards, making it difficult to track conversations or get a full view of a customer’s moving needs and history. Phone and chat conversations that started outside business hours could sit unanswered for periods of time because agents couldn’t respond right away.

The bottlenecks and inefficiencies only grew even more problematic during peak moving seasons when ticket levels spiked. “Messages are flooding in, phones are ringing off the hook, and customers are a bundle of stress and emotion,” says Supervisor of Production, Steve Lacoss.

Centralizing on a single, omnichannel CX platform

In 2022, Dorm Room Movers replaced its disparate support system with Zendesk Suite, gaining an integrated omnichannel CX platform.

Now, agents track and manage real-time and asynchronous conversations in a single workspace, and group them as ‘live conversations’, ‘active’, or ‘waiting on response’. Even if a customer takes days to respond, agents can pick up the conversation thread exactly where they left off without losing context or history. Because agents can clearly see all of the ticket details, the connection and customer experience feels smooth and seamless.

“Zendesk simplifies and streamlines support because messages from all channels come into one place,” reports Lacoss. “Agents get a full picture of the customer issue and can move conversations to the next level without asking customers to repeat their story.”

Expanding channel options with messaging

Dorm Room Movers introduced a text messaging channel using the Zendesk Sunshine Conversations platform. It also added messaging to its website, and provides session-based, synchronous support in real time via live chat.

“Messaging gives customers a right-now feeling that someone is paying attention to their needs. It’s all about building relationships and responding to questions,” says Lacoss.

The ability to respond faster and more efficiently enables Dorm Room Movers to adhere to its SLA times 41 percent more than it did in the past.

The company also pushes out sales and marketing campaign messages via Twilio SMS technology, allowing customers to respond via text. The strategy increased lead conversion rates by more than 79 percent.

Reducing workloads with Zendesk AI and self-service

To meet its customers’ self-help service expectations, Dorm Room Movers built a new self-service help center for its website and implemented an AI agent to answer FAQs. If the AI agent can’t resolve an issue, it escalates the query to the support team for a seamless AI agent-to-live agent handoff.

The improvements alleviated pressure on agents and let them focus on more complex customer needs. Today the company enjoys an overall containment rate of 52 percent, meaning that more than half of all customer interactions are successfully handled by the AI agent without needing escalation.

Zendesk AI’s call summarization is helping agents at Dorm Room Movers save three seconds on wrap up time per call. In just one busy week, the feature saved the company nearly 22 hours of additional labor.

Call summarization uses generative AI to automatically generate call summaries on tickets after each call ends. This frees agents from having to manually write call notes during and after a call. Instead, they can focus directly on solving customer problems and move efficiently from one call to the next.

Speeding comms with batch updates

No matter how prepared, unexpected situations can test the CX team. In one instance, a moving truck broke down and concerned parents were opening tickets on three or four different channels.

In the past, the team would have sent individual texts and emails to the affected customers. Now the company proactively messages groups of customers in just minutes. Lacoss appreciates the flexibility of Zendesk in a fast-paced business.

“With Zendesk messaging, we can push out batch updates to everyone who’s affected in real-time instead of sending 25 individual messages over the course of two hours,” says Lacoss.

Managing seasonal fluctuations with Zendesk WFM

Seasonal demand significantly affects the company’s ticket volumes and the size of its support team. During slower months, 15 agents handle roughly 300 calls per month. But in the busy moving season, up to 50 agents are needed to manage as many as 9,000 calls monthly.

To eliminate its reliance on spreadsheets for balancing its workforce, Dorm Room Movers recently adopted Zendesk Workforce Management (WFM), choosing it over Assembled for its robust reporting, agent activity tracking, and the level of granularity in its agent status features.

“The challenge is making sure we have enough people on the floor to handle the inbound production, but also recognize when we have too many,” explains Lacoss. “Workforce Management helps us redirect agents to the channel where they’re needed most and balance workloads.”

Already, Dorm Room Movers has achieved an agent utilization rate ranging from 89 percent to 95 percent.

Dorm Room Movers is also in the process of replacing its Playvox QA platform with Zendesk QA. “Playvox’s AI wasn’t quite as in-depth as Zendesk’s,” says Lacoss. “We like the call summaries and that the transcripts include time stamps and who said what. The information has been really helpful when responding to customer reviews.

“With Zendesk, our customer service strategy is only going to get better.”