How PODS Leveraged Technology to Grow Revenue and Create Growth Opportunities
Focused on Delivery:
PODS was looking to provide a more comprehensive moving solution that includes vehicle transportation and helps them enter a new market. Opal Perry, the Chief Strategy and Digital Transformation Officer, chose Focused to deliver the MVP for this new product. Focused started with product discovery and design research, quickly followed by the development of the product.
Focused on Results:
On day one of the release, the ACERTUS car shipping product built by Focused generated immediate demand, resulting in multiple quotes and multiple orders by the end of the week. The release was a viable and valuable foundation for PODS’ expansion of moving services and provided a fully integrated slice for a marketplace.
Focused on Partnership:
PODS traditional software release cycles often took over a year. Opal Perry and her team recognized the immediate cross-sell opportunity with auto shipping. Focused brought in a small, balanced team of product, design, and engineering to rapidly execute. The team was able to research the marketplace and release the MVP in 5 months.
The moving and storage industry plays a critical role in the American economy. Thousands of Americans move every year with the help of PODS, the industry leader in portable moving and storage solutions. PODS customers sign up to receive a storage container delivered to their location, pack it themselves, and PODS will ship it to their destination. After use, the containers are then stored at a warehouse or delivered to a new location.
During a move, finding a way to send your items to your desired location is only half the battle. The PODS customer journey is rich and complex with continued growth opportunities and new ways to meet customer needs. PODS hired Opal Perry, as Chief Strategy and Digital Transformation Officer to help drive new innovation for the business.
PODS serves its customers’ needs by coordinating complex functions across teams. A large part of Opal’s mission is to enable those teams to explore new revenue opportunities and provide a more comprehensive moving solution as part of the PODS customer journey.
This includes digitizing and simplifying their processes by coming together and understanding how each part interacts within the larger system.
Identifying a Market Need
Building on today’s consumer needs, demand for PODS portable moving and storage containers surged in 2021 amidst ‘The Great Relocation.’ This was compounded by limited availability and pricing of new and used vehicles due to semiconductor chip shortages and supply chain bottlenecks. Ultimately, this has resulted in an increased demand to ship cars versus driving them to preserve mileage, avoid wear and tear, and save time.
PODS chose to partner with ACERTUS, an omnichannel automotive logistics platform, to offer and execute nationwide auto shipping services for PODS’ residential and corporate relocation customers. The collaboration brought together expertise, infrastructure, and technology to deliver a customized and streamlined moving experience.
To bring the idea to fruition, PODS chose to partner with Focused to capitalize on the market need, design of the customer experience and the software development of the MVP. ACERTUS would handle payment processing, service and logistics. The Focused team was small and lean but fully equipped to work within the PODS ecosystem that involved its integration partners.
PODS made the strategic decision to work with Focused because of their ability to not only build the immediate MVP but to also expand the experimentation and modeling for the company’s growing needs in the marketplace. We wanted a partner that could help us evolve the future roadmap with agility but not just by throwing more bodies at the problem.”
Filling the Gap
Customer data explained that approximately 30% of long-distance customers also use car transport, and 8M households move long-distance each year. PODS had an existing referral program with ACERTUS for lead generation. However, there wasn’t any direct B2B integration. As an opportunity to capture new revenue, Focused helped PODS move from referrals to direct booking through the introduction of a car shipping portal.
The customer experience with PODS systems often involved some level of manual intervention on the back-end, including the handoff of spreadsheets, email tracking, etc…. A direct booking application inside of pods.com gave PODS the opportunity to automate a lot of the functionality and drive more awareness to car shipping services and capture more sales at the points where customers were highly engaged. This MVP encompassed the effort required to hit on all necessary aspects of the product to be considered viable to the business and valuable to its customers.
Focused provided more than just ideation around the art of the possible and prototyping. Their ability to produce reliable, working software in a short amount of time and iterate based on validated customer learnings helped us fundamentally change the way we look at software development. This was important to us if we were going to rapidly iterate on the future roadmap.”
Paving a Path to the Cloud
PODS’ website is deployed on-prem through a web content management tool. This platform made it difficult to begin building out a product that would see frequent iterations based on customer feedback. To avoid long time frames and complex change management processes, Focused helped design a solution that would be deployed to Azure in the public cloud. This included working directly with their infrastructure cloud team to support the deployment of the application and interaction with the ACERTUS API.
In setting up the Azure deployment, Focused took an agile based approach to modernizing the cloud infrastructure as it did with building the MVP, while managing to take into account critical aspects like security, compliance, etc…
Beyond the MVP
Focused will help PODS iterate on the MVP through learning and feedback from the business and users while continuing to identify areas for improvement and growth. They will continue to leverage iterative design and XP software engineering principles to rapidly deploy working software to production.
A fast follow to the MVP will be the ability to capture data coming in from the portal for analytics and business insights. This will help drive continuous improvement of the car shipping portal, helping PODS recognize more revenue, faster and improve their conversion rate.
Finally, with an eye towards an improved payment processing solution, the Focused + PODS team will also start a technical investigation into a new integration that will enable direct customer payment processing. Opal intends on parallelizing this work stream as part of her innovation strategy.
