Speaker: Alvin Lee S., Owner, The Goods Delivery Service
Tell us about your company and why you chose OptimoRoute.
Alvin Lee S.: Greetings, greetings. My name is Alvin Lee. I am the proud owner of The Goods Delivery service based here in the D.C., Maryland, Virginia area. I specialize in plant delivery. As you can see, I have a plant patch, cactus patch. I am from the Hyattsville, Langley Park, Maryland area. Grew up, born and raised, for most of my life, but I have lived a couple other places. So I currently am servicing about 5 to 6 clients, but main clients and a couple other clients who are seasonal. But this opportunity presented itself due to me basically losing everything. I was in Finance in the Acquisitions and Mergers arena and my business went down in 2016. I lost everything and was forced to figure things out and in figuring it out, I became a courier for companies like Postmates, Uber Eats and a handful of others. And in doing so I ended up touching base with a floral shop in D.C. and that floral shop took a liking to the service that I provided and recommended me to my main client and a couple other of my clients actually. And so, yeah, I have a business background so I turned my skills into a business and OptimoRoute basically changed everything for me. Given that I was delivering, utilizing just a map optimizer at first, not realizing that that there was any plug and play type of apps prior to OptimoRoute, but OptimoRoute basically streamlined my process for me in a major way. I really have to give props to OptimoRoute Yeah, there's a couple of other companies and I could have tried them, but I went with OptimoRoute so I'm gonna give OptimoRoute their praise. They have made my job so much more easier in so many ways such as being able to get into buildings easier just by showing the app. Like I said, streamlining the process, sending notifications to the customers allowing them to live track me through the GPS notification. OptimoRoute is the optimal choice.
How did you manage route planning before?
Alvin Lee S.: So as I mentioned briefly, in my intro video, I was using an app called inRoute. Yeah, inRoute. And it was optimizing my stops, but of course, it wasn't sending notifications and kind of really optimizing as OptimoRoute does optimizing, you know, the ability to finish deliveries in a timely fashion. I guess I could say the biggest takeaway is really that part, is making the process longer before OptimoRoute. It would take me, let's say if I had 30 deliveries, 30 deliveries was taking me like 8 hours, sometimes longer. OptimoRoute basically cut that in half, almost, depending on the location. But yeah, it basically was cutting in half my time and so I could maximize on the amount of things I could do in a day. So that was the biggest takeaway of utilizing OptimoRoute.
How has OptimoRoute helped your business?
Alvin Lee S.: I'm gonna say customer satisfaction has definitely increased. Customers are usually pretty impressed with me letting them know that this is my business and they think that I guess that I created the app or some sort, I don't know. But yeah, the customer satisfaction, they like the GPS tracking feature.
How easy is OptimoRoute to use?
Alvin Lee S.: After figuring out the basics of what's applicable for what I do, it's super simple, like I pretty much, it pretty much takes me like 2 minutes at the most 5, ok, maybe 5 minutes depending on how big the route is. If I have a super large route, maybe five minutes and if I have to do like edits, if some addresses may not come up properly because there's multiple addresses, I gotta edit those. But yeah, it's pretty simple at this point.
How important are speed and flexibility for your business?
Alvin Lee S.: Speed and flexibility is actually pretty important. Just based off of it, it cutting down the amount of time it takes to do all of my deliveries in a day. If I have other jobs, I get a lot of random jobs, spontaneous, like out of out of nowhere kind of job. So, me doing my job and everything I have to do in a speedy, fast, effective manner is what optimizes my ability to maximize on the amount of work I can do in a day. If I feel that that's necessary, I'm not even, it's not even so much of how much jobs I can do in a day it's just overall what I can do in a day because I wear a couple hats which I'm starting to divest and distribute those jobs to other people now that I'm expanding. But yeah, if I was able to finish my deliveries in a day early, then I'm able to focus on my business, on the admin side, on the HR side, whatever other hat I was wearing. It allowed me that ability to put the focus on that when necessary because OptimoRoute increases, like, in a very exponential way how fast I'm able to complete my deliveries.
