Leader Spotlight: How features evolve from wants to necessities, with David LoPresti

David LoPresti is Director, U-Haul Apps at U-Haul. With experience in a wide variety of areas, including operations management, customer service, sales, and marketing, David has grown his career at U-Haul over the past two decades. He began his tenure as a service manager before transitioning to web sales and, later, program management. David then became director of Moving Help, a U-Haul service, before taking over the U-Haul Apps program.

In our conversation, David talks about how certain product features have evolved from customer wants to things that customers now need and expect as part of their experience. He also discusses how his team educates customers on products or services they may not know they need during the moving process.

Putting customer needs over business needs

You’ve had lots of experience with team building and coaching. How do you promote a culture of innovation and responsiveness among your teams, especially in an industry that’s not traditionally associated with rapid digital innovation?

It can be a challenge at times, especially working for a company that’s been in existence since 1945. Our core business has been largely the same since then — we started with trailer rental and have moved into truck rental, self-storage, and several other products.

It’s sometimes a difficult conversation amongst the organization because we’ve been so successful for so long. There’s always this attitude of, “If it’s not broken, don’t fix it.” But the reality is if we look at what customers are asking for, we have to be willing to change and meet their needs, not our own.

Many people fall into the trap of trying to prioritize business needs over customer needs. But when we’re dealing with a product that’s sold exclusively as a consumer product, we have to be willing to accept that we might have to do things a little bit differently to deliver what the customers want, not what we want.

Do you have an example of a product development that represents prioritizing what the customer wants above the business?

Yes — we started to embrace the idea of utilizing an app for customer experience just over a year and a half ago. The experience of a customer walking into a location and renting a truck at the counter is very different from the customer who expects to do it on their phone.

We also launched our Truck Share product back in 2016, which introduced the idea of being able to check in and self-dispatch. It was a web-based process and it’s evolved since then, growing to be more of a necessity rather than a feature.

Simplifying the experience as much as possible

You mentioned that one of the challenges you’ve faced at U-Haul is that a consumer may not need to use your services with great frequency. How have you used digital touchpoints to enhance the customer journey?

One of the things that we came to realize is the enormity of the customer data that we have access to from doing this for 75 years. We have information on where customers are moving from, where they’re moving to, what time of the year they’re moving, etc.

There are several things that we can do just to simplify the experience. For example, within the app, we’ve made a very concerted effort to recognize what the customer might need to do based on historical data. Say the last time a customer rented a truck, they dropped it off at a particular location. Most likely, if they’re now moving, they’re leaving that place. If we suggest that location to them, that will eliminate two to three button clicks and expedite that process.

How do you look at how customers’ moving needs change over the course of their lifetime? Some moves are predictable, like for college, while others may not be.

It’s sometimes easy to understand what they’re really looking for. Somebody coming in who’s 22 is likely moving into their first apartment. Perhaps they’ve just graduated college and likely haven’t accumulated a lot of items. This customer will probably need a smaller truck that’s easier to maneuver in an urban area.

That person’s needs are very different from somebody who’s, say, 65 years old. They’re most likely retiring and downsizing. Both customers are doing the same thing (moving) but their needs are vastly different. The 65-year-old likely doesn’t think about all of the things that go along with moving because it’s been a few years since they did it the last time.

Another example is moving televisions. For someone who last moved 15 years ago, their TV was a 150-pound console. Now it’s a 50-pound flat screen. Moving those two things could not be more different. In fact, flat-screen TVs are always one of my favorite things to talk about because anytime we buy one, we throw that box away.

So, we let customers know that we offer boxes specifically for flat-screen televisions. A simple product recommendation can go a long way because that $20 TV box could save thousands of dollars in damages if they don’t package it carefully for the move.

How do you think about those types of value-adds within the moving process and suggest them to customers?

We try to make sure that customers are aware of relevant products to them rather than just trying to push things onto them. That’s where we are really going to start separating ourselves from our competition. Based on someone’s particular move, we can say, “Here are the things that other customers like you need.”

I was talking to our CEO earlier about how giving our customers time is the most valuable thing we can provide them. Time is precious and moving is hard. It can sometimes be very emotional as well. One of our taglines is, “We make moving easier,” and you’ll notice that we don’t say “Make moving easy.” That would be disingenuous — moving is not easy, regardless of how well it goes. We can make it easier, and if we do that, we’ll continue to be successful.

Educating customers on what they might need

Thinking about your app, for example, how do you design it to further connect emotionally with users?

I pay attention to what competitors are doing, as well as people outside the industry. There’s no shortage of companies in the last couple of years who’ve really revolutionized customer experience. Companies like Uber, Lyft, Instacart, GrubHub, etc., have boomed. Ultimately, as a customer, you’re paying a premium for convenience. We’re trying to recognize the fact that the customer is trying to complete a task as quickly and as efficiently as possible.

We’re also trying to solve how we can get them from point A to point B as quickly and efficiently as possible without dragging them into a bunch of unnecessary tasks. It’s very simple to serve customers. It’s just a matter of whether or not we actually listen to what they want.

Part of your role is offering curated experiences to customers. Could you say more about that?

We’ve been primarily focused on this idea of leveraging the knowledge that each of our program managers has regarding their individual business units. Sometimes it’s easy to take for granted that the customer doesn’t know certain things about moving. For example, take something as simple as our portable storage product U-Box. These are storage containers that can be delivered directly to someone’s home. The customer can load them at their convenience, and then we will ship them to their destination. This is a great option for customers who are apprehensive about driving a big U-Haul truck, which is understandable.

With that said, they might not remember or realize that they need to have a lock to put on this container during shipping. We can do something as simple as making sure they understand that they need a lock to secure their goods and offer it to them in the purchase process.

That educational component must be very important. Do you offer other means of education when the customer is going through a purchase process, such as tutorials?

Yes, we are heavily prioritizing informational videos. Customers who are transporting a vehicle on one of our auto transports or tow dollies need to understand how to load the vehicle onto the trailer. If we see that they’ve never rented from us before, we display an open app claim —which is some tips on how to properly load a vehicle onto the trailer — when they open the app.

That video, which used to just be on YouTube instead of being embedded in the app, had more than a million views. It’s important to pay attention to the content customers are looking for. If I can surface that without him having to search for it, then they’ll recognize that this was something they needed to know anyway. They didn’t have to go search for it — U-Haul knew they needed it.

Storytelling and understanding the customer journey

You’ve talked about some ways that you’re personalizing experiences for customers. Do you have an example of how you’ve used either personalization or storytelling to meet the needs of individual users?

The idea of storytelling was really new to me about a year ago, and we’ve adopted it to the point of getting our CEO to embrace the idea. We’ve seen a dramatic change in our organization in terms of being able to curate experiences over the last couple of months by getting the business units to think about the problem they’re trying to solve by talking about the story of the customer.

I’m working on a presentation for a group meeting to expand on this idea of customer claiming. Just having our group lay out “As a customer, I need X because of Y,” gets them to pull the knowledge that they have in their head and define it in a way that helps to identify what features are necessary. We used to struggle with this because we had so much customer data. We had a repository of 35 million customers and multiple data points.

A great example of this is helping customers who rent trailers avoid trailer sway. We’ve created stickers on our trailers with some tips. To avoid trailer sway, the driver needs to make sure that 60 percent of the load is in front of the axle and 40 percent is behind. The person who runs our trailer program knows this in their head, but the customer doesn’t know it. To communicate this to the customer, how do they identify what data set is necessary to find those customers? Simply writing out that story and understanding the customer journey has helped immensely.

Your role is very focused on providing experience vs. solely bringing in revenue. Could you talk about that element of the job?

Of course, there’s some monetization there, but the direction that I was given by our CEO when I was asked to take on this role was to serve our existing customers. We’re in a very enviable position versus a lot of organizations simply based on how large we are and how long we’ve been in business.

Our monthly website traffic can vary between 10–15 million visitors. If all we did was take care of those 10–15 million, we will continue to be as successful. We could spend a lot of time, effort, and resources trying to chase down those customers who won’t come to us, but until we firmly believe that we’ve taken care of the customers who’ve already shown interest, that’s where our opportunity lies.

You’re obviously very focused on serving the customer. Are there some techniques or strategies you’ve used in the app to reduce friction?

There’s a time and place for us to really leverage the native capabilities of a device. Of course, U-Haul had an app for many years prior to me taking it over, and it was essentially a wrapper of our existing websites. It did everything that it needed to do, but it didn’t do it the way customers expected. We’ve learned, especially over the last 12 months, that there are a lot of processes in which we really need to capitalize on the native technology.

Our business is very heavily reliant on location services. We’re reliant on photos and customers documenting the status of their equipment. Understanding and changing those processes to leverage native capabilities has made a huge difference. Being able to upload the photos and obtain driver’s license information natively saves us a couple of seconds, but on the customer side, it’s much more seamless. We do have to leverage that because, of course, we could rebuild everything natively.

Surrounding yourself with people who supplement your skill set

How do you go about partnering with other organizations or subject matter experts to better understand what the customer wants?

We work with external partners like AppsFlyer and Airship for communications. A fairly transformative shift for us as an organization is realizing how we’re going to get to where the customer wants us to be. And sometimes, that’s admitting that we don’t have the right answer. There are plenty of organizations and companies out there that have tools that can do that, but what we learned very early on was you have to have a real proof of concept.

It’s very easy to have ideas, and it’s very easy to say, “This is what I would like to do.” But unless we sit down and figure out exactly how it is that we want to do something, we can lose a lot of time and gain a lot of frustration.

I’m surrounded by a lot of employees on my team who are very capable and very organized. I like being the idea guy, and sometimes, I’m not the best person to keep things in line and see the idea come to fruition. Recognizing that you have to surround yourself with people that supplement your skillset is important. That’s the biggest thing I’ve had to do over the last 18 months, and ultimately, the customer benefits from this combination of multiple skill sets.

Lastly, what are some things you look for beyond just traditional experience when you’re hiring for your team?

I like to tell the story of how I found my footing at U-Haul. I’d been here for a couple of years and was working in our retail sales group, specifically our online Box Store. I had an opportunity to work with our field personnel — the general managers and employees at the stores. I loved being able to support boots on the ground, and a position came up for a program manager in our dealer operations group. It was one of the most prestigious program manager positions in the organization. I applied for it even though I didn’t meet all the requirements.

To my surprise, the vice president of that group hired me. About a month later, I finally asked him why he took a chance on me. He said, “Well, I figured one or two things were going to happen. You were going to exceed my expectations, or you were going to fail spectacularly, and I wanted to see which one happened.”

Using that experience, I’ve tried to align myself with people who want to be part of the solution regardless of their background. Because at the end of the day, a job is a place we go to earn money. People can talk about work as family and things like that, but we all work, either voluntarily or involuntarily. I want to work with people who feel that they have something to contribute, regardless of what that is.