JK Moving's Ken Cohen shares his strategy behind 74% revenue growth

According to Gartner, 420 billion words are exchanged during interactions between businesses and customers, every single day.

This staggering data, if organized, analyzed and reported correctly can derive a wealth of insights. One customer interaction with a sales rep can shed light on critical revenue generation opportunities like— effective product pitching, script adherence, process adherence, impactful openers and closers, the list is endless.

Enter Conversational Intelligence.

The next generation of sales and support workers are going to be AI-empowered. They are ultra productive, thanks to AI and automation technologies, with built-in coaching workflows that focus on constant iterations and improvements to enable revenue growth opportunities.

Below we’ve edited and condensed a truly powerful conversation with JK Moving’s Ken Cohen, SVP Business Development and Observe.AI Power User. ‍

You can access the full webinar recording here.

He deep dives into how JK Moving achieved 74% revenue growth, identified an additional $1 million revenue stream in just 30 days, and increased process adherence by 48%.

Hi Ken, can you share a little about JK Moving Services?

Sure. At JK Moving is the largest independently owned and operated moving company in North America. We handle about 20,000 moves a year— local, interstate, and international. We also have great relationships with the military and the embassies, and have even provided moving services to Presidents and other dignitaries in the past. 

So, what challenges were you facing with your sales team?

Right, so we had a 25-30 member outside sales team, who’d go for site inspection and meet with the customers in-person. We had one or two on inside sales and their primary job was to book appointments for the outside sales. 

The process was simple but still quite inefficient. Some of our challenges were:

• Manual processes: Manually listening and monitoring calls is time consuming and inefficient. Then, making sense of that data is very hard. 
• Skewed QA evaluations: On average only 1-2% of calls were analyzed and monitored for quality assurance purposes because of lack of manpower and associated costs. 
• Conversation data opacity: No insights into how many calls were getting transferred, which agent answered it, what’s happening in the customer conversations, and more.
• Small database: Only a small percentage of our customer conversations was being fully recorded.
  

We had this infrastructure but it worked as “just customer support” for the company. As a business development manager, for me these customer conversations were a treasure of insights inside an inaccessible black box.

JK Moving grew 74% revenue. Can you share how you hit this ambitious target?

Historically, JK Moving only grew at 10% y-o-y. But in two years, after implementing Observe.AI, we hit an overall growth rate of 74%. In the two years that we've been on Observe.AI, we've analyzed almost 230,000 phone calls!

AI-technology played a massive role in achieving this growth. 

Our outside sales team had a high 45% conversion rate. But my goal was to focus the inside sales team into booking big ticket appointments and maximizing the efforts of outside sales. I mean, are we giving them a piano move or are we giving them a five bedroom apart home?

We closely monitored customer interactions. For example, the inside sales team would say they offered packing and valuation to all customers. It’s like an upsell in the moving world. But after implementing Observe.AI and analyzing Moments on 100% of the conversations, we saw the reports and that data showed otherwise.

What are Moments?

Moments help contact centers digest and distill their conversation data to identify and track key instances that are meaningful to their business. Well-programmed Moments act as the gateway to valuable insights that can help contact centers improve CX behaviours, accelerate revenue growth, boost operational efficiency and drive better compliance.

A Moment is essentially a way to offer keyword search capabilities that helps you identify and track key instances on a call that you know are meaningful to your business. You can  customize Moments to meet specific business needs. With a technology called tonality detection, it does sentiment analysis on 100% customer interactions, and highlights whether the seller had a negative tone, dead air, empathy score, script adherence and more.

Watch Observe.AI’s Moments feature in action here.
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At the peak of our moving season, we found we weren't effectively using packing and valuation offerings. It’s like on a Saturday night, the restaurant should have larger parties with full course meals, but instead you are offering soup. During the busiest time of the year, we weren’t taking full advantage of revenue growth opportunities.

Observe.AI enabled us with detailed insights on course correction, process adherence and team collaboration to increase higher average revenue per sale, higher packing, and valuation.

Speaking of process adherence, you hit 48% with agent coaching. How did you achieve this?

We simply tried to understand what are the conversion obstacles we were facing. 

For example, we had a Moment for “next day move”, and saw to it that operations and sales and customer care all worked together to put a process in place. Now, every time the phrase “next day move” came up, it was flagged, and every department had visibility into it.

That’s one of the many anecdotal stories. Reality is we took our call flow, and with the help of the Observe.AI team dashboard, evaluation forms and reporting, started customizing our coaching sessions. We have one person dedicated to the Observe.AI who sends out reporting, observations and coaching forms. Each manager owns their team. There's no such thing as too much coaching, so we really use it as a coaching tool. 

Another exercise we did was asking our agents what they think are their best calls. But the reality was they weren’t scoring high on what they assumed were their best. That right there was a coaching opportunity. 

I mean, if you are not scoring high on your best calls, can we all agree there’s a coaching opportunity? All I said was— will you accept the coaching to help your customers understand the things they need to do to have the best moving experience in their lives? 

From five to 108 people in platform sales, outside sales and customer care operations people, were now getting customized coaching to improve their personal processes.

How did you scale adoption of Observe.AI?

Today, we have 108 people actively using the platform. We have one full-time, dedicated person for analyzing moments, downloading reports, and sharing it with team managers. They communicate with the managers, who in turn empowers their team’s towards professional development. I have one person for 108 people and that one person could probably handle 200, because it's not the people, it's the process.

But to get to this scale, it was all about showing value to your team. 

So prior to Observe.AI, people were calling to cancel. We'd explain to them about our non-refundable deposit policy and they’d complain— “No one told me”, and it becomes a he-said she-said situation. Happens in every organization.

My question was— Are we informing the customer on why we have the non-refundable deposit policy? 

Now we had hours of calls and manually listening through them was impossible. With Observe.AI, we used the keyword search capabilities and found the exact conversations where an agent mentioned “non-refundable deposit”.  

Instead of being reactive, we proactively coached agents on how to effectively convey “non-refundable deposit” policy to our customers. We quickly showed the value of Moments— how it protected the moving consultant, company, and ultimately, the customers.

Everyone bought into that revelation and Observe.AI’s capabilities spread like wildfire throughout the organization.

What advice would you give to sales leaders?

It correlates to our increase in revenue, our decrease in claims and satisfaction, and mitigates compliance risk.

If you want to understand what is happening on each and every one of your customer interactions, how much does it cost for you to generate a lead, why your customers dropped out, and most importantly, take away the anecdotal feedback, you need deep insights. You need to go into the depths of detail and truly understand the root cause. Be forward looking, adopt technology that’s easy, fast and efficient.

I'm not a technology guy but when I see technology that can help us level up, then it’s not an oncoming train, but a light at the end of the tunnel.

To view the full webinar recording, click here.

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