The average American uses 1.4 dumpsters in their life. Almost everyone needs one at some point, and when they do, they’re often going through a stressful experience. Whether they’re moving, remodeling, or taking care of a loved one’s belongings, they need all the help they can get with renting a dumpster.
And the dumpster rental industry has unique challenges: Local trash haulers are focused on the logistics of getting their dumpsters to the right place and don’t have much time or resources to dedicate toward sales and marketing. That can make finding a dumpster challenging for customers, leaving them with unanswered questions about costs, timeline, and size.
Budget Dumpster connects homeowners with haulers in their area to simplify the dumpster rental process. They also provide homeowners with resources on how to navigate the home cleanout process. The company has scaled quickly to meet these unique needs, and after renting over 1 million dumpsters, the Budget Dumpster team needed a communications platform that could help them continue to scale without sacrificing the quality of their customer service.
Here’s how Budget Dumpster leveraged Heymarket to automate and scale their sales and customer service while delivering the same stellar customer service.
The company
Budget Dumpster, based in Westlake, Ohio, has humble beginnings dating back to 2009. Founders John Fenn and Mark Campbell originally created a boutique real estate office, which also helped clients with their home cleanouts. They discovered the primary burden homeowners faced throughout this process was renting a dumpster. Realizing the demand, the duo quickly pivoted to offer a service that easily connects anyone with a dumpster rental.
Over a decade later, Budget Dumpster still delivers on its original mission by rolling up its sleeves right alongside customers. With more than 300 employees serving 4,000 cities across the U.S., Budget Dumpster has become known for its excellent service. But their customer service team receives over 700 calls a day, so they are constantly looking for ways to scale their processes.
The challenge: Finding a robust Salesforce SMS integration
Budget Dumpster’s unique brokerage model requires a sophisticated tech stack allowing them to communicate with both end customers and local vendors. Salesforce is at the center of that tech stack. Their team lives and operates in the Salesforce platform, and their primary challenge was finding a text messaging solution that would live in Salesforce with them.
They previously used Zipwhip, which allowed them to send SMS from Salesforce. The team was manually sending dozens of SMS follow-up reminders a day, a tedious process that took away time that they could be using to serve customers. To reduce manual work, they needed to be able to automate rules-based text message sends within Salesforce — a feature that Zipwhip did not offer.
Additionally, Budget Dumpster has an omnichannel call center that includes phone, email, and SMS. Text messaging had already helped them reduce their hold time and call abandonment rate, and they wanted to continue that momentum by offering the most personalized experience possible. Rather than general toll-free numbers that multiple users share, they needed individual 10-digit phone numbers for each call center staff member that worked for both texting and calling. Each member of this 100-person team needed their own inbox, plus the ability to invite other team members so they could manage messages from a central place.
The Solution: Migrating to Heymarket to centralize texting in Salesforce
When Zipwhip announced it was shutting down, the Budget Dumpster team needed a text messaging replacement that would allow them to run all messaging from within Salesforce, and to replace their manual follow-ups with automations.
After vetting the options, they chose Heymarket because of its robust Salesforce SMS integration. Heymarket’s attentive support and smooth Zipwhip migration process allowed Budget Dumpster to transition an entire year’s worth of contact and texting history into Heymarket. Without interrupting their messaging, they hit the ground running in November 2022 with the more advanced Salesforce integration.
Budget Dumpster’s extensive text messaging strategy with Heymarket covers three different use cases:
- Sales
- Customer service
- Conversational messaging
Here’s how they built each one.
Sales: Scaling follow-ups with the Salesforce SMS integration
For their sales team, Budget Dumpster uses messaging in a variety of ways to expedite communications throughout the customer journey. They carry out all of these workflows directly in Salesforce with Heymarket’s integration.
When an inbound phone conversation leads to a quote, Budget Dumpster’s sales reps conduct their follow-up from the lead page in Salesforce. As soon as they finish the call, the sales rep chooses a text template in Heymarket’s Salesforce widget right alongside the lead record and customizes the template with quote information. The pre-built template allows them to send personalized texts quickly and move the sale forward faster.
When prospective customers are ready for their service, Budget Dumpster uses Salesforce Flows to automatically take them through the post-sale follow-up. To build this Flow, the team added texting to their Flow just like they would add any other Flow trigger and action. They set up trigger criteria signifying that the sale had been completed and customers’ account balance had reached zero. When the criteria are met, they trigger an action to send a Heymarket SMS template, which follows up with the customer to provide them with helpful, post-sale information. This automation both encourages omni-channel options and reminds customers of additional service opportunities.
Customer service: Automating customer reminders
The Budget Dumpster team leverages Heymarket’s native app for their customer service texting. Customers call and text in using toll-free numbers. The team manages the high volume of inbound requests with their shared inboxes, which allow them to see all incoming messages to give full visibility to any team member they add to the inbox.
In addition to receiving inbound questions, the Budget Dumpster team sends outbound reminders to customers about their dumpster pickups. They used the Heymarket API to pull customer pickup dates from Salesforce and trigger native Heymarket automations. When customers’ pickup date reaches day 5 and 7 of their 10-day service, customers automatically receive texts reminding them when their service ends. Once set up, these automations fire without any manual work from the team and help customers avoid late fees, extending the company’s standout service.
Conversational texting: Building relationships
The Budget Dumpster team also uses Heymarket to have 1-on-1 conversations with customers to build relationships. They work with contractors who each use an individual 10-digit phone number, allowing them to create a personalized experience while giving customers a convenient channel to reach them on.
The results: Decreasing call time while improving visibility
The first thing that the Budget Dumpster team noticed after switching to Heymarket from Zipwhip was how reliable it was, and how much more functionality it gave them in the Salesforce platform. While they previously had to send follow-ups manually, Heymarket’s integration allowed them to create Salesforce Flows and native texting automations that took those manual tasks off their team’s plate. Managers across the business are excited by all the possibilities Heymarket offers and brainstorming new ideas of what to try next, Angelini said.
Heymarket helped Budget Dumpster reach their goals of decreasing call hold time and abandon rate. Their average hold time decreased by 13 seconds year over year, and their average call abandon rate decreased 1.3% year over year. Text messaging has been instrumental for that experience. By allowing them to offer individual phone numbers for different team members while centralizing team access in shared inboxes, Heymarket has helped them take their personalization and collaboration to the next level.
Text messaging has also supported their overall customer experience. Budget Dumpster’s NPS score improved by 3 points over the last year since they adopted Heymarket. While Heymarket was just one driver of this, customers have shared plenty of positive sentiment about their text messaging reminders. They’ve expressed how great it was to get an immediate response from an actual person, and appreciate the relationship they’re able to build over texting, especially during the stressful moving experience.
The team agrees spending less time on hold is contributing to customers’ happiness: The more you give customers options, the happier they’re going to be. Text messaging has been a crucial channel for giving customers options while freeing up their team’s time so they can serve more customers, make more sales, and continue offering the great experience their customers love.
