Junk Chuckers

The concept behind Toronto-based Junk Chuckers—best explained through the company’s tagline, “Helping Canadian homes and businesses be junk-free”—has clearly resonated with the public. Almost as soon as the junk removal company opened for business in 2019, owner Al Noufaro found his small team taking booking requests over the phone as fast as they could handwrite the orders on sticky notes.

Noufaro credits a number of factors for Junk Chuckers’ early success: the cultural trend toward minimalism, the popularity of decluttering shows like Tidying Up with Marie Kondo, and the fact that the high prices of Toronto real estate have been causing many residents and businesses to downsize. But as Junk Chuckers turns the corner from startup to successful small business, Noufaro points to a new factor that helps explain his company’s rapid growth: the use of RingEX™.

So many benefits from using the right phone system

“Switching to RingCentral from our local telecom service has improved our whole business,” Noufaro says. “I’ll give you a few examples.”

“Our old phone system didn’t give us a way to digitally centralize or monitor activity. Our sales guys tracked their pipelines using sticky notes and Google Docs. A Google Doc is fine, but it’s a flat, dead document. Thanks to RingCentral’s integrations, I was able to connect our phone activity with our CRM and the project-management app Trello. That gave our team a whole new simplified view of call activity, the status of leads, and what everyone’s next actions should be. This improvement alone really moved the needle for our business.”

“Even better, I was able to do this integration myself, literally overnight. With our previous telecom provider, I would’ve had to pay for an API connection, and it probably would’ve taken four weeks minimum to complete. But we got this done in a few hours, using an API connection that came included with RingCentral.”

“Another benefit is that we can now let our sales reps work from home. They can just set up the after-hours calling system to transfer business calls to their cell phones in the evenings. Or they can grab a headset and make calls through the RingCentral app on their laptops.”

“This is a huge advantage for two reasons. First, we get a lot of snowstorms up here in Toronto. RingCentral’s call-from-anywhere feature lets our employees be just as productive outside the office. Second, as I said, Toronto real estate is ridiculously expensive, and knowing we can hire remote workers means we won’t have to expand our physical office space as we grow. I’ve run the numbers, and having RingCentral is going to cut down on our real estate expenses by at least half.”

The numbers don’t lie

Speaking of running numbers, Noufaro is a data-driven entrepreneur. “My background is in automation, digital strategy, and online advertising,” he explains. “I live by numbers and data. And the data on RingCentral’s contribution to our company tells an amazing story.”

One of the most important data points for Noufaro deals with converting incoming calls to bookings. “RingCentral has boosted these conversions by 275%,” he explains. “A key reason is that, during hold times, RingCentral has a voice prompt that comes up every few seconds, telling the prospect their call is important to us and that someone will be with them soon.”

“It might sound like a small thing. But since we fired up that feature, we’ve noticed the average caller waits an additional 60 seconds—and that wait time gets them to a rep, which is why our phone-to-bookings rate has skyrocketed.”

“Another incredible stat is that since we rolled out RingCentral, our revenue has more than doubled—it’s up 230%. We’ve reviewed all other factors to see what else might be responsible, and we’ve isolated RingCentral as the primary driver.”

“Thank goodness we found RingCentral!”