Jieying Zheng is Chief Product and Technology Officer at Bellhop, an online platform that serves residential and corporate customers by connecting them with movers and providing a seamless digital and physical service experience. She began her career at GE and worked at the Embedded Systems Lab at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, as well as Nanosolar, before completing a master’s degree from Stanford University. Jieying then joined Sears Holding Corporation, where she got into product management. Before her current position at Bellhop, she served in various leadership positions at Groupon and Chowbus.
We sat down with Jieying to talk about how she promotes repeat customer behavior in a traditionally non-repeat business: moving. She discusses how Bellhop differentiates itself by remaining accountable for quality and a great customer experience. Jieying also reflected on her career journey and offered insights on selecting the best product track for one’s career.
Throughout most of my career, I was in highly repeatable businesses like ecommerce, food delivery, and restaurant technology. I didn’t fully appreciate that before I joined the moving industry, where it’s hard to drive repeat business.
There’s a belief that there isn’t much incentive for consistency of quality — in our industry, it can be more hit or miss. Every time a customer books a move, most companies focus on getting the best margin out of that transaction. They don’t worry much about whether the customer will come back because there’s usually a significant lead time until the person moves again.
This mentality doesn’t incentivize scaling up because if you don’t care whether the customer comes back, then you’ll only prioritize getting the best margin over everything else which you can do more easily focusing on a small crew in a small geographic area. Because there isn’t that economy of scale, at least in the mindset of our incumbents, there is no incentive for innovation either — because innovation exists to drive scale and consistency.
We saw a huge drop-off in moving when COVID hit. After the pandemic, there’s been a jump from all the leftover demand. In the second half of 2020 and 2021, we saw an increase in revenue, but in 2022, inflation hit and changed everything. Interest rates directly affect how many people buy homes, move, and therefore use our services.
This year, we’ve seen a slow recovery. We know there’s likely going to be one interest rate reduction this year, and people are slowly coming out of their shells in buying and selling homes. Of course, a market slowdown doesn’t mean we can’t grow — we just have to take more share of the market to continue moving upward. I’m proud to say that we are growing despite these macroeconomic factors.
Moving companies generally operate in a small, geolocation-based, scattered business. At Bellhop, we want to change that. We believe that in every industry, consumers deserve an experience that continuously raises the bar.
When I talk about repeat customers, I am starting with the B2B2C side of our business. Our business customers who operate in a moving-adjacent industry, such as home furnishings, see value in serving their customers with moving provider options. We see value, of course, in getting business from them. In many cases, it’s reciprocal — we can share our customers with them and vice versa because they can use both of our services.
There are many strategies for pursuing that type of B2B2C model. You could send a daily email or link to a co-branded landing page and booking flow. You could also utilize an API base. We use our technology to enable this kind of integration. This repeat channel helps us hold ourselves accountable for quality because these big national brands will only continue to work with us if we deliver a great experience to their customers. We also make a specific effort to engage our individual customers and drive repeat sales, including another move or another service offered by one of our partners.
We can do all the customer surveys and feedback collection we want, but at the end of the day it’s just words. Customer behavior itself tells us what customers actually care about.
We use software for our consumer behavior analysis. As a logistics marketplace, we want to marry that data with our internal operational database to see how behavior translates into business metrics. We do a lot of that to influence our experience.
Bellhop is the company that’s driving personalization in the moving industry. We steer consumer interaction on the spot. We look at what customers want in terms of service and present different experiences for them, but it’s hard to correlate. It’s different from ecommerce in that we can’t simply use past behavior data to predict what someone will do next. A customer may have been renting an apartment the last time they moved; that doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll be in an apartment for their next move.
We track customer lifetime value (CLV), which is pretty rare because a lot of times, in the moving industry, the standard is to use transaction-level metrics. We also use CLV to correlate a lot of behaviors to questions. For example, if a first-time customer was introduced to us through web booking, does that mean that they have a higher CLV? Or if they actually had more digital interaction with us via customer dashboard visits, does that translate to a higher CLV?
In moving, we have to measure it through a much longer cycle. CLV goes across multiple years. On the B2C side, it’s important for us to look at the churn as well. Are we losing large clients? We have frequent touch points with them and continually review our performance, opportunities, etc.
On the supply side, we measure the attrition of the moving personnel who work with us (who we call our “pros”). We’ve found that attrition drops off after a pro works their fifth move with us. Said differently, the likelihood of a pro sticking with us is much higher if they’ve worked five or more moves with us than if they’ve done one, two, three, or four.
We view our customers as human beings and consider repeat as a big part of the business. That in itself is already unconventional in the moving industry. Another strategy is that we focus on digital engagement instead of just waiting for the repeat purchase.
The more digital engagement we see with a customer, the more likely they are to be a repeat in the future. We see a high correlation, whether that means they dive deeper into our booking flow, visit the dashboard multiple times, or choose a self-service option.
Finally, we provide remote, digital quotes and we stand behind them. A lot of work goes on behind the scenes to perfect our estimation so that when we give a customer a quote, we have the highest confidence that it accurately reflects what the customer will end up paying. We try to be as predictive as possible.
Sure. I’ll use an example from my time at Chowbus. Chowbus used to be an Asian-based food delivery app. For years before I joined the company, there was a fun feature in the mobile app. If you ordered something on the app, a fortune cookie would come up on your screen. If you clicked it once, it would open halfway. If you clicked it again, it would open fully and reveal a fortune cookie message. You could then share that message with your social network. It was a terrific branding initiative because those social media shares helped increase recognition for the company’s name and logo.
When I started working at Chowbus, some users said that they were disappointed that they always saw the same fortune cookie. We looked at our product analytics data and noticed that very few customers would share their digital fortune cookie on social a second time, even if the message was different.
One customer suggested making something special for the Dragon Boat Festival. Our designer created a digital image of a zongzi — a traditional Chinese triangular-shaped snack wrapped in bamboo leaves that people eat during that festival. Similar to the fortune cookie, the zongzi was designed to open and display a message on the second click. It took a lot to convince leadership to make this change, but we could immediately see the difference.
People were sharing 10x more than before. We also found that social shares dropped off after 10 days with the same design. So we changed our process to refresh the graphic approximately every two weeks based on holidays, seasons, etc.
Back in 2005, I was a developer in an embedded systems lab. I was coding on the mobile client side, as well as the backend. One day, I suddenly realized that I was good enough at the job, but I was never going to be outstanding. So I started thinking about what motivates me. I knew that I cared about technology, not just for itself, but for its impact on human beings and business results. With that understanding, I gradually switched my career into product.
I encourage everyone to think about their careers in that same way. What is it that you care enough about that you want to be outstanding — not just good enough? As a developer, I was never competitive. As a product manager, I am. I want to be the best product manager in the organization — or the best that people have ever met.
A lot of product manager tracks that drive a specific digital asset. Because I care so much about business results, I’ve always picked roles that will give me P&L ownership.
For example, at Sears, I could have been a PM for search, the mobile app, or the customer profile, but I wanted to be the product manager of the marketplace business. I knew that would not only give me a look into consumer experience, but would also expose me to supply strategy, tooling, and logistics automation. I also got to own the growth — the P&L of the marketplace — together with the business GM.
When you’re considering a career switch, there are a lot of criteria to weigh when making a decision. Specifically, there are material criteria and non-material criteria. When I interview candidates, instead of asking them to tell me about their background first, I say, “Tell me the top couple of criteria on your mind at this stage of your career.” This helps me understand if our role will offer them what they’re looking for.
To your second question, yes — at different stages of a career, those criteria are going to be different. For example, my marketplace role at Sears was my dream job. I didn’t care what kind of title I got — I cared more about the ownership.
I started caring more about title after I got to the director level. That’s because now, it’s also about who I represent. I’m a female and a woman of color. I have to explicitly argue for it because it’s about whether or not my function has a seat at the table, and whether or not I, as well as who I represent, have a seat at the table.
I’d say my roles at Sears and Groupon helped me tremendously, but the most interesting switch was when I transitioned from Groupon’s Head of Product for Goods to working at Chowbus. At that time, Chowbus was at a very early stage in its life. It was Series A when I joined and was riding the pandemic high, and by the time I left, it was Series B. It started as a food delivery company, but now, it’s more of a restaurant technology company.
I took almost a 50 percent compensation cut when I left Groupon to join Chowbus. I remember talking to my husband about it at the time and he made a good point. He said, “Think of this like an MBA. You have to pay for the MBA, but it pays off after you do it. Go for it.”
The pace is fast, but I think it’s more about risk and reward. At an earlier stage company, every decision you make has broader consequences. I thought that Chowbus would be the same as startups I’d worked at before, but it was definitely not the same. The infrastructure was very different. The level, risk, and reward were very different too.
With that said, I fell in love with this type of company. I don’t foresee wanting to go back to a large company after having that experience. Even though I technically took a step back in terms of compensation, I considered it to be a very worthwhile education.
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