Cleanly

Company

Cleanly was founded in 2013 by Tom Harari after his experience trying to do laundry at his Park Slope, Brooklyn apartment complex. The building didn’t have laundry achines so he would take all his clothes to a nearby laundromat and spend hours washing, drying, and folding his laundry.

The experience of broken machines, cashing quarters, and the lack of dryers led him to start the company. Cleanly was accepted into Y Combinator, a premier startup accelerator, in 2015 and raised a $5 million Series A in 2017.

Designed for professionals, families, and students; Cleanly is a pick-up-and-deliver, wash-and-fold laundry, and dry cleaning on-demand service. The company offers 24-hour turnaround for laundry, giving back those hours customers would spend at the laundromat or dropping off and picking up dry cleaning.

Cleanly services all types of laundry. From clothes, dry cleaning, and home bedding to in-home alterations, Cleanly aims to add value across the entire laundry experience. Customers can use the Cleanly app to schedule pickups, customize how clothes are treated from detergents, water temperatures, or softeners.

The app also allows customers to photograph stains and upload them to the order so Cleanly is aware of trouble spots that may need more attention. Cleanly is also working to vertically integrate all services so that the company can ensure the best service.

Currently available in the Upper West Side, Midtown, West Side, Brooklyn, and Long Island City, Cleanly is expanding its presence to Washington D.C., to provide for the professionals of the nation’s capital. The company is optimizing logistics to ensure that it is delivering high-quality service.

Cleanly plans each service expansion carefully. Rather than rapidly expand, it is making sure it is able to serve everyone before moving out farther.

Challenges

Based in both the United States and Manila, Cleanly’s growing customer support team currently consists of 13 members. When Cleanly started its customer support department, it saw legacy support providers as the best solution. These brand names promised a lot and Cleanly needed to ramp up support quickly.

As Cleanly expanded into new neighborhoods, customer feedback highlighted the need for service changes. It adjusted to 2-hour time slots because customers needed more pickup options. Some needed 6 AM pickups and that lead to expanding hours. It went even as far as to switch from metal hangers because customers were saying they caused indentations on items.

Cleanly’s customer support scaled as the business grew, but the support platform it was using wasn’t versatile. Cleanly’s previous support solution supplied voice and IVR, but didn’t have all the modern features necessary. Scaling agents around holidays and onboarding quickly were improvements it was looking for.

Cleanly had discussions with its previous provider to see if it could get new features, but was unsuccessful.

That was when Cleanly began looking for a new solution. It was very important to find a partner that considered customer support as a priority. A company’s customer support would convince Cleanly if it was worth working with them. From the first conversations, Cleanly knew it had found a partner.

Solution

UJET’s platform offers a simple and clean agent experience. Cleanly knew that chat would become a preferred channel and would need to add it in addition to voice and IVR channels. Agents needed all communication channels in one place so they could provide excellent customer support experiences and meet its 24-hour service level agreement.

Cleanly discovered how the UJET platform integrated with customer relationship management (CRM) software and presented customer information before a call is answered. To improve the experience Cleanly was introduced to queue prioritization and setting business hours in the platform. It was shown how to create separate and unique IVR trees to intelligently route customers to correct queues quickly. Additional features like real-time customization and agent scaling along with whisper call features showed the robust feature set.

Reporting customizations gave Cleanly important data insights to locate areas within customer support to optimize. Being able to break down all the platform data was an option that Cleanly didn’t have before. By using the UJET platform, Cleanly would have the tools needed to positively impact its customer support team and improve the customer experience.

While transitioning to a new platform can sometimes be a long, complicated process, it only took a single meeting for the Cleanly team to see that the UJET platform would improve their workflows.

Results

After Cleanly implemented the UJET platform, it quickly began seeing improvements. With every communication channel located in a single browser tab, agents were able to address issues faster without having to switch between programs.

Cleanly’s customer demographics are tech-savvy and use the app as the primary channel to contact support. They favor chat and text within the app to any other channel. Along with voice and email, UJET helped Cleanly optimize support for chat and text in order to meet their customers on their preferred channels and streamline the support experience.

Cleanly previously averaged around 46 voice calls a day. That decreased to an average of 17 calls after UJET integration. Customers call about estimated delivery times and other concerns, but those can now be answered in text and chat. Cleanly customized its IVR trees with multi-level options to ensure that common issues could be answered efficiently.

Queue prioritization was a required feature for Cleanly. It was important that high-priority issues were resolved quickly. With these improvements, voice call wait times also lowered from 6 to 13 minutes to one to two minutes.

 

The transition to chat as the primary channel could have caused Cleanly a lot of problems, but the UJET customization features allow it to manage chat support in real-time.

Support emails decreased by 64 percent since Cleanly implemented chatbots. Cleanly engineers built its chatbot and designed it to direct customers to the Knowledge Base or FAQ for simple problems. If the chatbot can’t resolve the issue, it connects to an agent.

Cleanly is able to scale support as needed and by leveraging popular channels like text and chat, customers are being served more efficiently. Cleanly’s focus on improving the customer experience led to a 13 percent increase in its customer satisfaction score (CSAT).

Conclusion

Cleanly’s on-demand laundry serves active professionals, students looking for convenience, and families wanting to gain important personal time. It knew that it would have to offer a robust text and chat option as customers moved away from voice and email.

The company’s customers are mobile-focused and the Cleanly app would be the primary support entry point. Chat and text became the preferred channels because customers wanted the convenience of fast communication. By realizing this, Cleanly has laid the groundwork to provide excellent support and scale as it expands to new markets.

The UJET platform simplified the agent experience enabling them to focus on fast resolutions, quality support, and providing a personalized experience with each interaction. Cleanly’s customer support is empowered with a cloud-native platform that offers all the needed features for support success.

All these improvements have benefited customers too, providing an improved customer support experience. Cleanly’s audience is always onthe-go and relies on the company to handle personal items with care and be available on demand. By meeting its customers on the channels and platforms they desire, Cleanly is ready to scale into new markets and become a leader in on-demand laundry services.