"We at UniGroup are very excited about the opportunity to do business with Rose Rocket. The platform and the technology that they present for our organization modernizes us literally overnight, and puts us into a position to better service our customers, and as importantly, service our agent family."
Scott Kluesner, Executive Vice President of Operations, UniGroup
“We had several agents in the pilot program, and the early adoption agents have said that they have become more efficient by 25%, which has allowed their customer service reps to be able to handle other customers, provide better customer service, and work on additional projects during the day”.
Julie Colona, Director of Forwarding Solutions, UniGroup
“It’s about the customer and serving them. We needed to create a better experience for our customers, and this platform allowed us to provide more visibility, faster.”
For Scott Kluesner, Executive Vice President of Operations at UniGroup, all roads lead back to the customer, and this was what brought forth the search for a technology partner back in 2018.
UniGroup is no stranger to exceptional customer service. The parent company of United Van Lines and Mayflower Transit, UniGroup is the leader in household goods and moving in America for decades, bringing in $1.4 billion in revenue as an organization. Between the two business lines, they are responsible for 1 out of every 3 interstate moves in the United States – and with every move, customer service and experience are held to the highest of standards.
While its household goods and moving business line are well-known within the transportation industry, its $300MM Logistics division has been quietly delivering exceptional results in the background, offering white glove services from priceless pieces of art, to high-end electronics. The niche specialty and high level of service resulted in a great amount of growth for UniGroup within its Logistics division.
“Our Logistics division became the fastest growing business line. We have an aggressive plan to grow the business, and we see it as a billion-dollar brand capability in the business”
Scott Kluesner
Activating the agent network to enable hyper-growthUniGroup’s Logistics business is vast in its offerings, supported by a network of Agents who are highly trained motor carriers that work within the family of the UniGroup brand. The key to hyper-growth lies in its ability to work better within the Agent network: to collaborate on existing contracts and customers and to connect on available supply and servicing opportunities.
UniGroup found Rose Rocket in 2018 as a technology provider to offer TMS capabilities into its agent network. Throughout the next two years, what was an initial vendor-customer relationship, quickly expanded into an embedded and strategic partnership.
As an early collaborator on the UniGroup partnership, Co-Founder Justin Bailie recalled the ambitious goals that were presented to Rose Rocket:
“UniGroup came to us with a vision and a mission to build a world-class logistics organization. We worked with them to co-create a plan that would allow UniGroup to better connect and collaborate with their agent family, while creating industry-leading visibility all the way down to the shipper side.”
Working closely with the UniGroup teams for the past 3 years, Rose Rocket created a key accounts team dedicated to ensuring that the UniGroup experience is exceptional from onboarding to product usage.
"It’s not often that you find a service provider that is enamoured with and excited about learning your business. Because they had that vested interest in learning our business, we felt very comfortable and confident in them ultimately delivering a platform that met the needs of our customers and of our agent family."
Scott Kluesner, Executive Vice President of Operations
With Rose Rocket, UniGroup can enable two main capabilities in its Logistics Platform:
1) Improve Customer Visibility: By connecting all agents that are a part of a move, UniGroup enables all-mile visibility so that a customer can better understand where their order is in the sequence of their service and the condition their order is in.
2) Enable Internal Visibility: By seeing the agent's loads and locations, UniGroup can plan better, make decisions about the next load from the driver directly, and have an interconnected relationship with every party involved in a move. In addition, having agents connected on the same TMS platform also means that supply can be consolidated more efficiently in the future, offering UniGroup customers even more flexibility and service.
Enabling agents with the UniGroup Logistics Platform
For Nicol White, Director of Operations, rolling out the Logistics Platform became a priority in 2021 and 2022. To support the roll-out of the solution to the Agent family, Rose Rocket created custom programs around onboarding – a task that is well-known in the industry as being difficult – to support each agent’s preference and time availability.
Programs such as custom onboarding sessions, self-serve video tutorials, and in-product guides were made available to ease the pain of taking on a new essential piece of software that touches many parts of a trucking company.
For White, this unique and personal approach to collaboration between the two companies has made a mark on her time at UniGroup:
“My experience working with Rose Rocket has been phenomenal. Overall, it has been one of the best experiences I’ve had since I’ve been employed with UniGroup for about 25 years.”
Nicol White
In the midst of the rollout, operational efficiencies gained from the connected systems were a cherry on top of the visibility gain.
For Julie Colona, Director of Forwarding Solutions, working with Rose Rocket means that agents’ needs are being prioritized while she focuses on increasing customer experience.
“We had several agents in the pilot program, and the early adoption agents have said that they have become more efficient by 25%, which has allowed their customer service reps to be able to handle other customers, provide better customer service, and work on additional projects during the day”.
Julie Colona
What to do with the time saved? Give it back to customers, of course. Buying bandwidth back for the agents means that they get to spend time proactively managing customer relationships rather than reactively triaging tasks at hand.
Looking forward
Having Rose Rocket as a technology partner means that UniGroup has access not only to the TMS, but also to key extensions of the TMS that can be used to streamline processes from other parties within the transportation process. With the usage of the Driver Mobile app, documents pertaining to an order can flow automatically into the TMS, and even to the Customer Portal – a secure app for customers to log on to – if they wish.
This has allowed UniGroup to be able to better service existing customers while priming the environment for account expansions.
"We at UniGroup are very excited about the opportunity to do business with Rose Rocket. The platform and the technology that they present for our organization modernize us literally overnight, and puts us into a position to better service our customers, and as importantly, service our agent family. It’s just exciting times here at UniGroup when you think about the future of the organization."
Scott Kluesner
