Excellence in delivering destination services to relocating professionals and families depends on three critical elements: compassionate and expert-level service professionals, a friendly and engaging tech and digital content experience, and smart process design to support these elements. Dwellworks implements all these elements into every customer experience, across the range of our clients’ globally mobile workforce. In previous blogs we’ve highlighted our key to service excellence and the curated content and accessible technology in our employee portal myDwellworks. In this blog, we look at the engineering that makes those services possible.
Finding new and better ways to serve our clients and their customers is always at the top of the priority list at Dwellworks. We care about their experience with us and know the relocation process can be complicated for a first-time, self-managed move, a mid-career professional on their way up, or an executive and family moving to a challenging location. Clients expect every experience to be seamlessly executed; and customers want assurance they will be listened to and responded to at speed. Making sure our people have the infrastructure and resources they need to augment tech-delivered assets with expert customer care is the role of our Operational Excellence team.
At the end of 2023, we welcomed back Jeff Wynes, formerly our VP of Destination Services Global Supply Chain,
as our Head of Operational Excellence to analyze and streamline everything that goes into the user experience. With the perspective of his first few months back, we asked him about his key objectives and focal points for this new year as Dwellworks continues to invest in all that is required to elevate our services.
Jeff began as an intern with our Destination Services team in Detroit in 2010. He was hired as a full-time Customer Manager that same year, where he continued to show leadership, including establishing our first client-requested destination services office in Luxembourg, and being named the Operations Leader for Dwellworks’ global expansion and operational integration, as our footprint extended to 16 countries and hundreds of cities worldwide. Much of this work dealt with extending our already industry-leading network of local, expert Consultants, eventually earning him the roles of Director and then Vice President of Global Supply Chain in 2017. In early 2022, Jeff left the relocation industry to work at Flexport, a global logistics company, and returned to Dwellworks in 2023. In his current role, he’s designing our processes for next-level excellence using his valuable experience in customer service, process automation, and global support operations.
Our Conversation
What does Dwellworks excel in and how will you harness those strong suits in your new role?
Jeff: We are extremely customer-oriented and are strong operators across the board. Whether it’s our knowledgeable Consultants, our supply chain team working in tandem with our service delivery managers every day, or our client-minded technology like myDwellworks, we are ready and willing to help in any way.
Managing thousands of service experiences every year, we want to strike that balance for our service team between ‘thinking on your feet’ and having a reliable process to guide you, preferably one that automates administrative tasks and frees them to have all the time they need to engage with and support our local Consultants, customers, and clients. Part of how we do this is staying ahead of the steps in the process and identifying any gray areas, so we can see issues coming and resolve or eliminate them through AI-informed process design.
Opportunities for continuous process improvement include:
Where do we see AI fitting into what we do?
Jeff: When it comes to AI, it’s really all about responsiveness. This goes back to better understanding customers and both anticipating and also responding to their needs. We are in a very fortunate position: we have use cases of hundreds of thousands of customer experiences. We’ll find the patterns and look at where AI can be factored into our already existing platforms like myDwellworks. Do we add a ChatBot that can answer general relocation questions or questions about where to find what in the platform, for example?
It’s this type of intelligence that will streamline what we do and meet the customers where they are. Nobody waits for answers anymore – that’s just not the pace at which the world works. Using AI to discern patterns of customer needs, understanding what information they want and in what sequence, separating repetitive tasks from the personal needs, and much more, will become the foundation of everything we do. We will continue to differentiate ourselves from other DSPs by investing in the products and processes that enable our high-performing teams to be even better and more customer-centric than they are now.
How do we weave commitments to ESG and Sustainability into our Destination Services operations?
Jeff: I’m a bit of a broken record here, but data, data, data. The more we learn about the kind of topics that are important to customers, beyond the required services in a scope of work, the better we can match our responses and our local insights to what really matters to them. myDwellworks already includes content to address questions about inclusion, sustainable resources, commute patterns and a lower carbon footprint, and more. As we learn more, we’ll guess less and prepare our service teams to know their customers both through personal discovery and great anticipatory analysis.
More immediately, we proved during the pandemic that we can effectively deliver our services virtually. We need to understand how often, maybe in a majority of instances, that is how customers prefer to be communicated with. What matters in a service experience is expertise and trust, more than proximity in a car. This is where we continue to demonstrate the value of tech-first resources like myDwellworks, the Walk Thru app for pre-move in inspections, and the how-to guides for hundreds of communities and individual settling-in services that we’ve created, and use them to bolster the customer experience more than ever. This will further reduce our carbon emissions without compromising service. We expect service delivery will be ‘both/and’ not ‘either/or’ as we make our way to more sustainable mobility overall.
We’ll also continue to enrich and expand our incredible Consultant base. We didn’t get to 98% customer satisfaction by not understanding our transferees, but as mobility populations continue to diversify and as their service experience expectations change, we will continue to ensure our talent meets our clients’ talent where they are. We’ll always be sure our local experts know their communities inside out, advocate the use of technology to streamline the customer experience, and take the time to provide the customized experience that makes a destination service program memorable. By giving our team a platform and process, we will make it even easier to focus on the individual needs of every transferee and find solutions that fit their precise requirements.
As a logistics expert with your time at Flexport, what tools did you learn there that you want to bring back to Dwellworks?
Jeff: Having a service background, then going from moving people to moving shipping containers and back to people, there is more common ground than what you might think in the mechanics of what we do. I’ve learned that there are always ways to improve what we’re doing, even at the highest level of one-to-one personal service, by looking at the mechanics of how it’s done and fine-tuning. I also learned the essential importance of visibility – whether it’s tracking a shipping container or steps in the process of a move – everyone wants to know what’s going on, what to expect, how to prepare. By finding better ways to work together to anticipate and solve issues instead of using the same practices of the past, we’ll better serve our clients and their customers.
Need a destination services partner who delivers excellence in the customer experience at scale across all your key locations? Contact our team here.
Dwellworks is the world’s largest provider of destination-related services and temporary living solutions for the globally mobile workforce and business travelers. We provide business-to-business solutions for Fortune 1000 and emerging companies directly and through their relocation management partners. Whether a company needs to relocate its employees across the world or the country, we provide a range of support services to help employees and their families transition successfully from their home location to a new destination.
Dwellworks operates according to our core values of Integrity, Teamwork, Performance, Innovation, and Fun. These are the root of everything we do – from the Teamwork aspect of sourcing and supporting our helpful local Consultants to assist any relocating employee in hundreds of cities worldwide with their move, to the Integrity of our highly-trained Intercultural experts who are here to help transferees adjust to new cultures and confidently settle into their destination locations, to the Innovation of our myDwellworks technology platform that familiarizes employees on assignment with their destination and enables customized conversations on properties, schools, and situation-specific needs.
Dwellworks supports the diversity of our clients’ globally mobile workforce with personalized destination solutions in 16 countries, covering major relocation markets. Dwellworks has consistently responded to the mobility services and needs of our global clients. In 2020, Dwellworks launched Dwellworks Living to expand our original portfolio of corporate housing markets into a full-service corporate housing operation, offering alternative accommodations for relocation and business travel customers in 125 countries. In 2023, we launched Dwellworks Move, providing both destination services and corporate housing to small and medium-sized businesses. Our full-service real estate brokerage, Station Cities, supports home rentals, sales, and purchases in the Tri-State New York area and Chicago. Visit our homepage, learn about our services, and read our blogs to learn how we can help with your relocation and business travel needs.