Listening To Your Customers Can Pay Off: How Chelsea Is Saving The Holidays
Working in student housing can sometimes feel like you're on a runaway ship with dozens of tiny leaks. Your job, of course, is to shovel out the water quicker than it pours in. Shifting the sails windward or even steering the boat can sometimes be ignored in favor of just staying above water.
Most days, after hours of handling buckets full of ocean, you can feel a great sense of satisfaction. You kept that ship afloat one more day. Other times you may feel a bit defeated knowing that tomorrow you'll be greeted by the same flooded hull. You may struggle to recognize the difference you're making. On the worst of days, you may question whether you're making a difference at all.
It's on those days especially that we value people that go out of their way to listen to our needs; people that take our feedback and make tangible products that make a difference in our day to day work lives. People who have been in our shoes. People like Chelsea Burnett.
Chelsea Burnett's story is not unlike many of ours. She went to university (Go Gators!), started her career, fell in love with a boy, and then moved to the big city. In high school Chelsea was the editor in chief of her yearbook. She enjoyed the rush of meeting her crazy deadlines and the satisfaction of having things she helped create stare back at her in a polished form.
In college Chelsea worked for a local magazine, selling ads to student housing communities in Gainesville, FL. Chelsea was quickly drawn to the sometimes chaotic, always interesting, days her clients spent managing multi-million dollar assets. It wasn't long before Chelsea decided to start her new career in property management.
Chelsea spent the next 6 years paying her student housing dues - bouncing from state to state to get her assets leased up and ready for turn. Fighting for each lease as August inched nearer gave Chelsea that familiar rush she felt back in high school.
“The best feeling working in student housing is knowing that on move in day, your property will house hundreds of students who will experience living on their own for the first time.”
Students who moved away from home, leaving their yearbooks back in their old bedrooms in hopes of starting an exciting new chapter in their lives.
Today Chelsea works for Postal Solutions, a company determined to make on site package management a stress-free experience. Their latest effort is ScanCam™ by PackageLog™, an app that can scan the name and bar code right off your resident packages. ScanCam became a reality in part because of Chelsea's passion (obsession?) for listening to on site teams and finding points of stress that her team can relieve.
"We knew PackageLog was already the fastest way [to log a resident package]. But we wanted to be faster. Our clients, and even clients of some of our competitors, where asking for a way to just scan the package. Yes! We thought. This is the answer. We spent two years on developing such a product that would make us even faster. We were determined."
It's been two years since Chelsea's been in the student housing game. The experiences, however, stay fresh in her mind and continues to influence how she approaches her job. As the holidays come around Chelsea and the PackageLog team have been showing off the new technology. This week they plan on releasing ScanCam as a free trial, hoping to show the value of the new technology during the most busiest time of year for packages.
"It's not an accident that we released ScanCam when we did. We knew this year would break records when it came to home package delivery. We wanted PackageLog to save the holidays."
And save the holidays they just may. At least for our on-site teams doing their best logging all of their residents' presents -- a few care packages filled with nostalgia, home made cookies, childhood photos... maybe even a old yearbook.