As an army veteran, Matthew Calhoun is no stranger to a hard-charging lifestyle. The junk removal industry fits him like a glove.
After retiring from 20 years of service in the Army in 2014, and starting G.I. Junk, Matthew and his wife Jennifer set out to create a business that focuses on taking care of their customers with integrity, respect, and compassion while providing exceptional customer service. Growing this family business from one truck to more turned out to be more complicated than it seemed on paper. As co-owner Jennifer Calhoun says, nothing prepared the couple for the challenges embedded in the junk removal industry, where they found themselves “doing more of the work and being less focused on growth.”
In other words, Jennifer found herself struggling with challenges that had nothing to do with junk removal or recycling. She found herself spending most of her time on “lead nurturing,” otherwise known as “converting prospects into paying customers.” With the business management tools she had at her disposal, she says, “it was impossible for us to do any sort of data analysis or make any kind of data-driven decisions around how to best convert interested customers into paying customers.”
Workiz and NiceJob recently sat down with Jennifer to hear about all the ins and outs of running a junk removal business, to learn about how the digital tools she uses help her focus on growth and customer satisfaction above all else, and why she’s really in the customer service business.
How has working with a field service management platform shifted how you do business?
“We have an aggressive growth strategy, and we need software that works not just for the company that we are today but for the company that we want to be in the future. Workiz was one of the really foundational steps for us and building the actual business that hopefully can survive, you know, long after we are personally doing the work”.
Why Workiz specifically?
“We wanted to get as many of our needs met in a single platform as possible. Workiz seemed like the right solution to pull our needs together with our field service management, and it has been very successful in that way.
“Workiz was one of the really foundational steps for us and building the actual business that hopefully can survive, you know, long after we are personally doing the work”
Take the integrated Phone System (now known as the Workiz Communications Suite) for example, the fact that we could capture our leads from the initial point of contact and nurture them in a systematic way was really appealing to us. We can easily see metrics such as how many calls we’re getting per day, how many of those are converting into leads, and how many leads are converting into jobs. So it’s really helped our customer acquisition process just level up.”
How has integrating Workiz with NiceJob helped you run your business more effectively?
“We started using NiceJob through the Workiz integration and it helps us achieve our goal of building a sustainable business. We are building a fully automated system and a structure that is going to stand the test of time, and I think this integration is key for that. For example, the minute we close out a job in Workiz, the customer is automatically put into the NiceJob campaign and the request for review is sent out quickly. We get notified of reviews right away and it allows us to respond to issues as quickly as possible.”
By integrating NiceJob with Workiz, GI Junk was able to automate the process of sending review requests to their customers when they mark a job as completed. In the first two weeks after connecting the two accounts, NiceJob helped GI Junk generate 141 reviews across their 3 locations. That’s a 473% gain over their existing reviews.
How else has NiceJob and the increase in reviews helped your business?
“I tell people all the time that the money we spend on NiceJob is probably the easiest money for me to spend.” We pride ourselves on our customer service,
“I always tell my team that we’re in the customer service business, and junk removal is just what gets us to the customer.”
People often need junk removal at difficult times in their lives and because of NiceJob when they look us up online, they can quickly see that our team cares and that others have had great experiences with us.”
“We love the Team Leaderboard in NiceJob’s Insights. Our crew has a friendly competition going on to see who can collect the most reviews and our leadership is able to quickly and easily identify areas where recognition or coaching is needed.”
What do you love most about using Workiz?
The integrations, for starters.
When we have visitors come to our website based on some sort of paid campaign, whether that’s Google Local Service Ads, Facebook, etc., we can easily create a cookie that captures what source drove them to us. Then, we use a form on our website where customers put in their information to request a quote when they submit that form. Our website also captures several points of invisible data, including the cookie, which indicates the ad source. We can effortlessly track everything.
How does it help you increase your revenue?
“In addition to creating the customer and the lead for us, the system labels that customer and that lead or that job. It also labels if they went ahead and booked online, down to the campaign level, the ad source that drove them to us. Once that data point exists within Workiz, we can easily run reports showing us actual revenue dollars earned per ad campaign.
“Workiz lets us get close to real-time ROA data, dial down what’s not working, dial up what is working, and maximize our return on ad spend”.
Is Workiz helping you improve your customer experience?
“Absolutely. Take how the call system works and how we can set up call trees and different Call Flows. That helps us triage a high number of calls with a low number of dispatchers, so when people call our main line, they get a few options to help send them to the right person.”
“Workiz took us to the next level where we were not having to manually invest so much time into supervision, monitoring, and analyzing”
“It improves the customer experience by ensuring they’re connected to the right person to handle what they need. This also helps us be more efficient with dispatch personnel.”
How were you able to grow your business?
“Workiz took us to the next level, where we were not having to manually invest so much time into supervision, monitoring, and analyzing. Our dispatchers, operations manager, and field techs could all speak with each other directly and be much more efficient. This gave us time to do other things in the business, like pursuing additional commercial contracts, getting our bids in for government service opportunities, and things that we wouldn’t have been able to do if we were tied to just the nuts and bolts of doing the business work every day.” 
Would you recommend Workiz to other businesses like yours?
“Absolutely. I think there’s an enormous value in the ability to comb through the data and understand the story it is telling us about the customers’ experience when they reach out to us, book with us, all the way through to the end.
I also know that Workiz is here to stay. The company is growing, and they’re constantly adding new features and more integrations. I routinely go into the section of Workiz to see what’s new, what has popped up since the last time I was there, and how we can utilize these tools.”
About Workiz:
Designed by service pros, for service pros, Workiz is an end-to-end CRM solution for home and field service management (FSM) companies. With Workiz, FSM companies can run their entire business from one central location. Trusted by over 110K pros across North America, Workiz streamlines field service operations and synchronizes communication between managers, dispatchers, techs, and customers. Workiz integrates with dozens of industry-leading ISVs, marketplaces, and platforms (including NiceJob) to enable service businesses to work smarter, save time, optimize operations, manage inventory, reduce costs, grow faster, and hustle smarter.
About NiceJob:
NiceJob is a reputation marketing platform designed to help home service businesses collect reviews and referrals from their customers to win more leads, close more sales and grow their businesses automatically.
They offer a comprehensive platform that integrates with Workiz via Zapier and makes it easy to share positive reviews to your website to boost your search engine rank and conversion rate, convert happy customers to refer your company, and offer valuable operational insights such as which employees are driving the best/most reviews. Their Convert websites offer a conversion rate guarantee where they’ll guarantee to beat your last website’s conversion rate by 10% or it’s free until it does.
Sign up for a 14-day free trial today and receive 50% off the first 2 months of NiceJob products, with no contracts or commitments.
