Imlach Group delights customers with Yembo

As part of its commitment to customer success, Imlach launched a video survey program near the end of 2019 using a range of virtual communication tools, expecting it would let the team perform more surveys in a shorter timeframe with a better customer experience than in-home surveys. With the onset of COVID in 2020, this became the company's main method of surveying.

Three things became immediately apparent: customers appreciated the online experience, Imlach saw a significant reduction in overhead surveying costs, and far more surveys could be conducted virtually than in-home.

Despite these benefits, challenges remained. Accurate virtual surveys still took too much time, which limited output to 3 to 4 surveys per day per surveyor, and Imlach was spending heavily to have a third party conduct surveys for shipments outside its immediate local market. After testing a variety of surveying tools, Imlach determined that Yembo's AI platform offered the most effective remedy.

An audit of Imlach's survey process surfaced three challenges. First, the team was not positioned to expand into new local markets or keep enough staff on hand to complete a workload of nearly 3,000 surveys nationwide per year. Second, because the manual process took hours of effort per survey, Imlach often outsourced the labor to other Atlas agents nationwide for a flat fee. Third, customers did not appreciate long wait times for on-site appointments, occasional delays from traffic or weather, or price changes caused by a poor or inaccurate survey.

By design, Imlach had always kept a small, streamlined workforce, but as the company grew so did inbound survey requests. With the on-site process, a surveyor had to record items room by room and build an inventory by hand, which held output to 3 to 4 surveys per surveyor per day and forced the team to contract outside Atlas agents. That left three options: expand and hire surveyors across the country, keep exporting the work at a significant cost-per-survey fee, or find a solution that empowered current employees to handle a larger load.

Because the first two options were not feasible, Imlach searched for the right tool. It experimented with recording a home on-site and surveying it afterward, with FaceTime-style video calls, and with a proprietary corporate tool that recorded the home for a later manual survey. Each was only a temporary fix. The team also ruled out solutions that required a customer to download an app, that put the customer with a non-Imlach representative, or that asked the customer to itemize their own goods.

Yembo gave Imlach a web-based survey that needed no app download, kept the customer with an Imlach representative, and generated the inventory automatically rather than asking the customer to build it by hand. After a comprehensive audit of the alternatives, the team judged it the most robust and least intrusive survey experience for its customers.

With Yembo in place, surveyors went from 10 to 15 on-site surveys per week to 40 to 50 Yembo surveys per week, brought work back in-house, and gave customers a faster, more consistent experience.