A few weeks ago, our Chief Operating Officer, Dan Hopkins, was on “The Real Estate Talk Show” on AM 640 radio, hosted by Erin Giannini and Erin McCoy.
Dan talked about June 30 being the busiest moving day of the year in Canada. He also discussed what makes TWO MEN AND A TRUCK® stand out from all other moving companies.
Give it a listen! For those who can’t, we’ve included a transcription below.
[audio:http://movingblog.twomenandatruck.ca/mb-content/uploads/2013/07/AM640-June-30.mp3]
Congrats on the radio interview, Dan!
[transcript]
Host: Simon, did you know that Sunday June 30th is the busiest day of the year to move? Well, moving can be a stressful endeavour, we all know that. We have all done it and we will certainly be doing it again. The first few times you may be able to get some help from friends and family, but that only goes so far. As we acquire more things in life, it’s difficult to get that sort of help when you have more stuff. So we need to talk to somebody that’s in the business, that can give us some professional answers to some of those, what we call, “moving questions”. So we have Dan Hopkins here, and he’s from TWO MEN AND A TRUCK and he’s Canada’s Chief Operating Officer. So Dan, thanks for calling in.
Dan: Thank you very much for having us, this is great.
Host: Why is June 30th the busiest day of the year for moving?
Dan: It’s just a combination of a lot of circumstances that just make that a very popular day. The residential real estate market really starts to heat up in the spring, and by the time people put 30, 60, and 90 day closing periods on their purchases, it just falls right back into June. Property taxes typically come due for their six month period review. Customers tell us that Canada Day gives them an extra day to pack, to get themselves and their families settled into their new environment before heading back to work on the abbreviated workweek following.
Host: Of course they expect you to have three times as many trucks on that one day, right?
Dan: [laughs] That’s exactly right, we do get a lot of demand for that day, but we’ve been around a long time. We’ve been in the moving industry for 30 years, so we know this is coming and we try to schedule people accordingly and give them enough head’s up so that they realize what’s going to happen and if we can, if its convenient, we try to move them off that one specific day, just because it is so busy.
Host: 30 years is a long time, so maybe you can tell us what services you do offer.
Dan: Well, we are a full service moving company, and what we do is, we provide custom moving solutions for our customers, so we’ll come out to your home, we’ll do an in-home estimate. We use a tablet computer to give you a written estimate at the end of that visitation, and in that estimate it’ll tell you exactly how long it will take us to do and complete your move. The estimate will give you a written price and will guarantee that price within 10%, so that what it does, it removes stress on moving day.
Host: Dan, there’s a lot of companies out there, so maybe you can tell us how you differ from all the others that are available to people.
Dan: We really focus on the customer experience, and every customer that we move gets a comment card and we reply to them via email. They send that comment card into us and we tabulate all those results, and we also get an instant indication that anything might be wrong on a particular move so that we can jump right onto that situation and get it corrected. You can imagine, our company had a total last year of 395,000 moves, and we generated a 96% customer referral rating from the moves that we did. Customer service is not just a glitzy title, we really live that core value every day.
Host: Honestly, I can tell you that I did use your organization. I had exceptional service, so that’s something I can say first hand. Again, everything that was promised, everything that was agreed to, was absolutely done and I felt that I had conceptional customer service, so that’s fantastic. So hats off to you and congratulations on your success.
Dan: Thank you very much and we appreciate you bring us into this conversation.
Host: Great to heave you on the show Dan. We’ll likely have you back again.
Dan: Alright, you take care.