The Best for Your Best Friend – Pet Transport on Salesforce
Guest: Laura Szewczyk, Manager, Blue Collar Pet Transport
If you have animals, you know how complicated it can be to make travel arrangements. Whether you’re moving across the country or purchasing a pet from another state, your four-legged family member needs a ride.
From puppies to ponies to potbellied pigs, Blue Collar Pet Transport safely moves their clients’ pets from one place to another. And they have to keep track of way more details than you’d realize. How do they do it? They manage every aspect of pet transport on Salesforce.
Today, manager Laura Szewczyk describes their early surge of success and resulting need to adopt a scalable organizational system to track data on all their new, eager customers. Enter Salesforce, which aside from getting their operations in order, offers numerous ways to optimize the customer experience. Every day, Laura sees her team’s Salesforce innovations at work–with new automations and processes constantly enhancing their ability to provide comfortable, stress-free transportation for their clients’ furry, feathery, and scaly companions.
From organizing leads to integrating payment systems and field service logistics, discover how Blue Collar Pet Transport demonstrates the impact of adopting Salesforce, whatever your business’s size or industry.
Don’t have time for the full interview? Here’s what you need to know.
The Highlights
Tell us a bit about Blue Collar Pet Transport. What do you guys do?
0:42 - We transport pets, as strange as that may sound to a lot of people. They're like, “Oh my gosh, that's a whole business?” It is a whole entire business. And what we've really done was focused and grown this into a corporate business where we can have real good values, good solid training and all the extra tools.
0:59 - Our little motto is pretty much that we make sure that every pet is transported as stress-free and as comfortably as possible.
Can you give us some examples of specific circumstances where people might want to transport their pets?
1:53 - We have found over the last few years that it really varies. Military [families] . . . get their orders and they have to move, and they have to bring their furry family members with them. We have people who are just purchasing pets for the first time that may not be local to them. They need them transported to them. We have our snowbirds: our regulars who go back and forth from the northern states down to good old Florida. There's so many different reasons, so many different uses for pet transport, but really what it comes down to is hiring a professional to handle pets and know how to handle pets on the road.
Do you guys have limits on what type of pets can be transported? Is it only gerbils?
2:43 - No, not just gerbils. The United States Department of Agriculture has a set of rules and regulations on what you can transport and how you transport them. And there's different stages in licenses that you can carry to make sure you're doing that correctly and properly. So we carry the top license: Class T licensing, which does allow us to transport all types of animals with the security that we know how to and agree to do it properly, of course. Gerbils, too. We've done horses, the strangest things like donkeys and potbelly pigs, so A to Z, we definitely take care of it.
What did you guys start using Salesforce for, and what was that like?
4:27 - We did not have Salesforce when we started. We started what we thought was a smaller company and we boomed. We grew and leads got super unmanageable and we were trying to figure out how to organize them. I met up with a Salesforce sales rep there, Steven. He really showed us how to use it as a CRM, which is what we purchased it for. [We] used it as a CRM so we could have some organization to our leads.
4:51 - The return on investment increases when you have organization to your leads. You're not losing leads or not taking care of them—all the things that make such a big difference for your company and for any company.
5:02 - Now once we got onto Salesforce, we realized the array of services that you can actually use in there. . . . what else can we do in Salesforce instead of having five to six computer programs up on our computers and everyone learning different stuff? We've slowly started consolidating everything into Salesforce, which has been super fun and exciting and making life so much easier.
5:27 - We've developed our payment system within Salesforce, so now we can take payment right on the same screen. . . . We are setting up AWS which is voice calls through the system, and we're even moving onto their Field Service Lightning, which is a routing software, which is obviously important for a transport company.
What are your warnings to other people that might be going this route?
7:17 - In general . . . if you are still hunting and looking at possibly using Salesforce, definitely look into how big whatever CRM that you're looking at can grow with your company. Some are very limited. We did not start with Salesforce. We had started another one and it really caused a halt, and then we had to redo it. . . . I say if you're not sure, just go ahead and use Salesforce because we love it. Make sure it's going to be able to continue to grow with your business on the scale that you want your business to grow because Salesforce has done that for us.
7:51 - Get [a] Salesforce rep that you love and get the development team . . . that you can connect with. It's super important to have that connection with your team because this is your business and you want things to go smoothly. You don't want to be chasing somebody to do this or that.
8:12 - Make a connection. Interview people. I have absolutely adored my Banjaxed team. We've been working very hard together for a while now. Just do your research and make sure that you're making those connections . . . that last the whole time you grow.
What big objectives do you want to accomplish on Salesforce?
8:46 - Pet transport is a new industry, so when it comes to routing and dispatching there's nothing made for it out there. This isn't trucking. We're not going to one or two spots. We have vehicle drop offs and pickups and it's constantly moving. [We need to track] how many pets we have, how big they are, and how many kennels [we need].
9:04 - We're working on building out our Field Service Lightning. It is super intriguing because it's supposed to have this amount of automation that will make our lives easier. Right now, we pay salaries and manpower to do all this stuff and it's supposed to automate some of that for us. It's smarter—it's a computer. We're really excited to get that going and to see what kind of automation is in store for us there. It sounds so promising.
Considering Salesforce but unsure how it fits your unique industry? Let’s see if we can find a solution. Drop us a line at contactus@banjaxed.com or use the form below.
