Wonjun Jeong, Founder and CEO of Supermove, explains why he believes movers are happy to adopt new technology, if they can.
While medicine becomes tele-medicine and driving becomes self-driving, moving is still moving. It still has a lot of catching up to do. So why hasn’t it changed yet - are moving companies just against technology?
I’d moved 14 times growing up until I graduated college. During a terrible moving experience in 2019, I saw it first-hand while scratching my credit card into carbon paper to pay for my move. I saw how badly this industry was falling behind the pace of digitisation that swept across other sectors such as healthcare, finance and retail.
Harvard Business Review published a list of industries that are the most digitally advanced, and moving, categorised under transportation, shows low digitization.
In an era where we can summon a ride with a few taps on our smartphones and have groceries delivered to our doorsteps within hours, the moving industry has yet to experience a similar transformation. I recall every one of my moves, and each time, I had no awareness or understanding of when to expect the truck at my new location. I kept calling the main office to get an estimated time of arrival.
The reasons behind this lag are complex and multifaceted, but it did not take me long to realise what was causing the big tech gap. To the customer, like myself, it seemed like movers were rooted in a historical reliance on traditional methods, but there were unique industry challenges that aren’t known to most.
It was after multiple moving experiences that left me disappointed, Mark Miyashita and I started building Supermove: specialised software for the moving industry. The most common belief from skeptics was ‘the moving industry does not want to change’, and that ‘we will struggle to build tech in an industry that isn’t digitally savvy’.
One of the primary reasons I’ve seen the industry grapple with resistance to any technology-driven change is the deeply ingrained nature of its processes ...