How Stewart Moving doubled in-home surveys in a year

One of the leading independent movers in the country, a 26-year-old, 9-market mover, doubled results without adding staff

Stewart Moving & Storage: 9 markets, 12 warehouses, 5 states

The lead response problem

Stewart's lead numbers weren't a problem, but leakage was.

The marketing engine worked with SEO across nine markets, with paid search in every territory, and two decades of local recognition. The phones rang with roughly 1,000 inbound calls a year and a steady stream of web forms came in overnight and on weekends.

But about 600 of those 1,000 calls went unanswered. The call center ran 9 to 5 with two people answering the phone, so anything outside that hit voicemail. Web leads converted to a quote at roughly 10% — meaning ninety cents of every web lead dollar was lost to slow follow-up.

“A lot of them come in overnight. They go cold and buy from somebody else before we get back into the office the next morning.”

Jennifer Zeile, Director of Marketing & Business Development

Smaller operators in Stewart's markets were answering the phone on Sunday nights. Not because they had better systems but because the owner's cell phone was the call center.

Stewart didn't want to staff a 24/7 call center, but the gap was costing them every weekend.

Why Stewart chose Supermove

Jennifer had been on a two-year search and Stewart was close to signing with a different vendor when senior leadership pushed for a look at Supermove.

Three things impacted the decision:

• Industry experience: Supermove was built for moving companies
• Availability of all three channels in one platform (voice, text, and email)
• Integration capabilities so they could get up and running quickly while using their existing systems

“We've got nine locations invested in this. We're looking for something that could bolt onto our GTL system.”

Wes Stewart, Owner

Implementation timeline

After the deal closed, the inbound voice agent (Laura) went live within a week, and the team had its first customer conversations in flight before the end of the month.

The first six months of using Laura gave the team time to refine the playbooks: how the agent qualifies a lead, when it routes to a rep, how it handles the customers who'd rather talk to a human.

“I feel like we have our bearings a little bit better now. This has been a very new process for us, but I think it's gone pretty smoothly. It hit a couple of snags, but I think that's to be expected.”

Jennifer Zeile

Outbound on web leads was next to launch. The first month Laura logged 86 outbound calls with roughly half engaging in conversation rather than voicemail. More than 22 booking links were sent automatically, and the first three confirmed bookings traced directly to the AI. What previously stalled or got sent to voicemail was now seeing real traction, without adding additional staff or more stress on the existing team.

“They were really patient. Really receptive to changes. Every time I'd reach out and say, hey, this call wasn't handled well — you can tell that they do this a lot.”

Ericka Peterson, Sales Manager

The results: more than double the number of in-home surveys

Once inbound and outbound were live, the team pulled the in-home survey numbers and triple-checked them. They’d more than doubled the same month the prior year. Higher than any single month in Stewart's history (the previous all-time high was 120-122).

“63 last year and 135 now. I checked that multiple times and had [someone else] check it because I'm like, am I imagining this?”

Ericka Peterson

Stewart had increased ad spend roughly six months before launching Supermove, which helped bring more leads in. But by their own read, only about a quarter of the growth came from that. The rest is conversion — same opportunities with more bookings.

“We are seeing increases on our number of in-homes. And this is the one thing we're doing differently is we have Laura [Supermove AI Agent] answering the phone.”

Jennifer Zeile

When a web form is submitted, Laura calls within minutes. So the call backlog isn’t a problem anymore. The lead either talks to Stewart immediately or gets a callback before they can reach out to another moving company.

“The faster we can get them to complete that next step, the less likely they are to call the next guy on the Google results.”

Jennifer Zeile

After-hours stopped being a black hole and customers and prospects got the answers they needed.

For Stewart, the AI isn't replacing the humans. It's replacing the voicemail and long wait time. Ericka's read is that a live human might still convert slightly better on the calls Stewart's reps actually answer. But the agent converts dramatically better than the voicemail alternative and gave Stewart 24/7 coverage.

For movers reading this

The cheapest lead is the one you already have. Stewart's growth came from converting more of what was already coming in, not from spending more to fill the top of the funnel. If your call center closes at five and your competitors' phones ring through to a cell phone on Saturday night, this is the gap, even if your services or pricing (or both) are better. The moving industry is moving, and the ones that make the change now will be around to see it.

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