Relocating Employees Can be Challenging: How to Reduce Costs & Keep Employees Happy
What if we told you there was a way to reduce your transferee’s household goods moving claims, save organizational costs, and provide better customer service? Improved customer service means on-time deliveries/pick-ups and happier employees. To accomplish all this, you’ll want to make sure your Relocation Management Company (RMC) has the technology and strategies in place to facilitate these objectives.
Supplier Talent Shortages Can Mean Higher Costs
Given the talent shortage, employee relocations have increased, since now organizations must move people from different states and even countries looking way beyond their office vicinity to fill open roles. All these employee relocations, plus global assignments, mean a higher volume of work for household goods (HHG) carriers but these carriers are experiencing talent shortages too. Driver shortages can equate to HHG carriers charging higher costs that are then passed on to your organization. “While the truck driver shortage has eased slightly, it remains near its all-time high. Based on our estimates, the trucking industry is short roughly 78,000 drivers. That’s down slightly from 2021’s record of more than 81,000 – but still extremely high historically,” according to American Trucking Associations Chief Economist Bob Costello, in a 2022 Material Handling & Logistics article. Household goods (HHG) move carriers can choose to accept or reject a move. Some may choose to accept a move even if they don’t have the workforce or equipment to handle the volume. This can translate into late pick-ups, late deliveries, undocumented crews, higher claim rates, and ultimately unhappy employees. The right RMC move management technology will avoid these potential problems and streamline the process.Virtual Bid Board
WHR Global’s (WHR) Move Management Platform (MMP®) offers movers a virtual bid board allowing carriers to choose the moves that best suit them based on crew locations/equipment availability, and reject those moves that don’t. For each move, carriers may choose to submit their price based on what works for their time frames and traffic lanes, while avoiding overbooking. These bids are calculated on WHR’s negotiated, fully transparent single-factor rate and create a mini-RFP for each move. This is especially advantageous when carriers bid lower than the negotiated rate during the off-season or to avoid low-load or deadhead trips. That means no more empty trucks and carriers can pull moves versus having moves pushed (assigned) to them. This type of model allows the carrier to save costs, which translates into a lower quote on HHG movement being passed on to your organization. Also, since the carrier can pull the moves they want, your employees can experience more on-time deliveries, pickups, and overall better service. After submission to MMP®, our Supply Chain team analyzes all available moving options based on locations, length of time of transit, ability to meet requested dates for the individual move, past performance overall satisfaction metrics, claims metrics, and on-time delivery percentages.“Our Move Management Platform has been a great program, as it allows us to pair the right move company with the right move. We developed this with a focus on utilizing a pull model instead of a push model. We want our move companies to pull moves in the direction that they want to work, as opposed to dealing with any move assigned to them. By doing so, we feel our move network will be better served to provide great customer service. This has been especially important over the 18 months while the moving industry has dealt with severe driver and labor shortages.”
Ensuring Excellent Service
Speaking of service, WHR has identified critical checkpoints throughout the HHG process. Our event management system sends real-time pulse surveys to make sure everything stays on track (e.g., confirm pack and load dates, delivery dates, satisfaction feedback, and more). If an issue arises, we can immediately step in to resolve the issue between the employee and the mover. Also, since WHR is a solely and independently owned organization with no vested interests or ownerships in any supplier organizations, we are free to choose the best HHG mover for each move. We can select suppliers with the best prices, service history, availability, transit time, technology capability, adherence to privacy requirements, references, and insurance claims percentages. When the best possible crew is selected, the probability of a claim drastically decreases, and satisfaction increases. WHR’s Supply Chain department is constantly vetting new suppliers to add to our supply chain so that we do not experience a shortage even though the HHG carrier market may be facing labor shortages. Remember, your RMC should have the right technology and strategies in place to save you organizational costs, reduce claims, and keep your transferees and assignees happy. You can view a short video describing WHR’s MMP platform here.
