Zoom2u was founded in 2014 to provide Australians with a better delivery experience. The pandemic created a massive surge for their service due to the growth in ecommerce and home delivery. Steve Orenstein, founder and CEO, explains how Zoom2u coped with the rapid growth, while transferring staff to work remotely yet still maintaining exceptional delivery experiences.
Steve started Zoom2u in 2014 due to the frustration he felt when ordering something online and not knowing when, exactly, it was going to be delivered.He comments, “I saw an opportunity in the courier space to give customers a better delivery experience. Having experienced, on a number of occasions, the situation where you don’t know when the driver is actually arriving and you end up missing the delivery, I thought, by using technology, I could connect the customer and the driver to create a much better customer experience”.
“I wanted to provide customers with greater transparency so they could see the driver’s live location as well as customers being able to book a courier and have something delivered to you on the same day. So, I set out to build a technology platform that essentially connects the customer to the driver in real time.”
A thumbs up for customer experience
Zoom2u has grown steadily year after year since it was established. They have helped over 70,000 customers and transported more than two million deliveries across Australia. “It’s seven years now into the journey. We’ve just become public in the last couple of weeks. Up until COVID, we were growing really nicely, onboarding lots of customers and lots of small businesses were using us. But then larger ecommerce and retail businesses started using us as well. And even logistics companies. We assist DHL with overflow volume and Nespresso in helping them with same day delivery and three-hour delivery”.
“We’re focused on what’s best for the customer and how we can enable that. One way is on completion of every delivery the customer is sent a message. They are asked to give their experience a thumbs up or a thumbs down. We feel this is more useful and allows us to respond more effectively than a five-star rating system. The customer has either had a good experience or a bad experience. If they had a bad experience, we want to know so we can do something about it in real time”.
A key feature of the Zoom2u service is GPS tracking, so customers can see where their packages are at all times and know when they will arrive.
To support any problems or enquiries with customer deliveries Zoom2u established a contact centre in Manila. They needed a contact centre platform that could easily scale as the business grew and could easily integrate with Zoom2u’s platform. Prior to the pandemic, Zoom2u deployed a solution from Twilio that has allowed them to scale their business and work remotely across different countries and regions.
Orenstein comments, “Because it’s fully integrated into our platform, the Twilio platform allows us to be very efficient. The call centre agent can see the live location of any driver and communicate with them or respond to the customer in real-time.”
The Zoom2u customer service team can see in real-time how their contact centre is operating, including being able to monitor agents’ performance as well as call volumes throughout the day to ensure they are adequately resourced where necessary.
When the global pandemic hit last year, Zoom2u decided to close its contact centre office in Manila and shift the team to working remotely instead. “This had no impact on our customer service, because we had a fully integrated phone system with Twilio. Our team was able to take calls and messages using their laptops at home,” said Orenstein.
“We were fortunate that we saw what was coming and were able to respond quickly. From a customer experience point of view, nothing changed. So, they were still able to call the same number. Customer service teams were still able to answer those calls and respond and call customers back from wherever they were”.
Zoom2u has seen a significant increase in customer orders since the global pandemic began. Lockdowns in Australia have meant more people are shopping online and the pressure on Australia Post has meant deliveries are taking longer to arrive, and shoppers are looking for alternative delivery options, such as Zoom2u.
The system Zoom2u has put in place is not purely for the benefit of customers but for the drivers as well. To cope with the increased demand, they had to onboard 300 new drivers within a short period of time. And they had to do this when every other delivery business needed more drivers. “Drivers like using our platform. They like the flexibility. The ability to add more drivers quickly has been just as critical to our growth and capacity to scale as the ability to add more customers”.
