How a leading moving and junk removal company optimized with Twilio

Names can be deceiving, and in the case of College HUNKS Hauling Junk & Moving, the core idea behind their business is much larger than their name would imply.

While the company did start with two college friends using a cargo van to provide moving and hauling services, the organization is now a North America-wide provider of high-quality moving and junk removal services that are fast, flexible, and reliable.

“It's kind of counter to our name, but we're really not just a bunch of college hunks. We're trained professionals customers can count on to do a really great job. We have a particularly fun, enthusiastic team environment, and we're very socially conscious,” said Mary Mills, VP of Marketing for the company.

To support their scale, growth, and expansion into the franchise business, as well as their efforts to be more environmentally conscious than the competition, the organization needed a phone service and SIP trunking provider that could expand with them, and they looked to Twilio to make it happen.

When the legacy provider couldn't keep up

Prior to Twilio, the company was using a legacy carrier to handle their phone service. The carrier service was not customizable or real-time enough for their Hunks team to manage. As the company grew, they started experiencing reliability issues with their existing phone service, explained Matt Knapp, director of product development for the company. The problem began happening more frequently, and resulted in outages the company knew it needed to resolve. In exploring their options, they decided to try Twilio Elastic SIP Trunking to solve their PSTN connectivity challenges.

“Our experience with our previous service provider just wasn’t as clean or consistent as what Twilio offered,” Knapp said. “From a developer and engineering standpoint, we’re able to go into a portal and change our SIP endpoints in real time with Twilio.”

From legacy to Twilio, overnight

The company decided to replace their legacy solution with Twilio Elastic SIP Trunking because of the consistent and clean cut service delivered by Twilio. Moreover, the true elastic nature of the solution and the ability to make changes real-time through the Twilio portal was important for the hunks team. When it came time to implement their chosen Twilio solution, the process couldn’t have been better, Knapp said.

The implementation itself was seamless, he explained, and the team was able to complete the switch-over process overnight, without involving support or IT. Once the team was sure the call quality was seamless and the SIP invites were working fine, they did a bulk import of all their numbers from the production system.

Because of Twilio SIP’s standardized nature, vs. legacy carriers with different formats based on hardware, the company escaped the long and arduous process of decoding and translation they had been experiencing.

“When I look at the SIP trunking side, the time to create a new phone number went from, I would say on average, 72 hours to seconds. So, huge improvement there.” Knapp said. “All of Twilio’s standard features were really appetizing to us, and that led us to ultimately choose Twilio.”

Exploring the possibilities

After such a positive experience with SIP trunking, the team looked to Twilio again for help improving its customer engagement system handling outbound communications and website leads. Twilio Flex fit the bill, said Keith Burkhalter, vice president of the company’s sales and loyalty center.

“I’m very excited about where we’re going with the Twilio Flex product, because I think for one of the first times in my entire career, I can say technology is not the limiting factor, because with Flex, the answer is always, ‘Well yeah, Twilio can do that,” he said.

The analytics and data provided by Flex will be of major benefit to the company, he added, and Knapp agreed.

“We’ve been able to make business decisions aided with data,” he said. “Our conversion rate grew 188 percent, from 8 to 23 percent.”

With recent changes due to the COVID-19 epidemic, the company was able to enable different ways for agents to manage incoming inquiries. Previously, they had been working from a centralized office as well as satellite locations across the country.

Now, the entire organization is remote, with hundreds of agents enabled to work from home. With the critical analytical data Twilio provides, including Voice insights related to call quality and volume, the company is able to continue—and even improve—it’s customer service despite the challenges created by the coronavirus.

“With Voice Insights, we can see, ‘Okay, yeah, well maybe it’s dropping because we’re losing a network signal here,'” Knapp added.