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When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, in common with thousands of other businesses, our team faced economic uncertainty. However, we’re a positive bunch here at Lola Tech, and we saw an opportunity in this crisis.
As client work slowed down our revenue was impacted and left some of our team without billable work. So, what could we do? We decided to focus on deploying our skills where they would be most needed and useful. This is how the "Our Bench Is Your Bench" initiative started.
While companies the world over, including Lola Tech, were struggling with the economic downturn caused by COVID-19, it was important for us to keep busy and help where we could. We put out a call on our website offering free support for startups and smaller companies that might have just furloughed or laid off IT staff. While in-house resources may have been scarce, IT staff were still needed to keep business running.
One of the companies that contacted us was Bunk, whose mission is to revolutionise the rental property market. gives property professionals and tenants all the tools they need to rent securely, without the need for letting agents.
During the peak of COVID-19 stringent restrictions were placed on the rental sector, including limitations on moving and viewings.
Bunk had fewer resources than usual to be able to service new and existing customers, yet demand grew as UK property owners turned to a digital solution. At a time when Bunk were struggling to keep up with demand, they saw the ‘Our Bench Is Your Bench’ initiative as a real opportunity. With our help, they managed to streamline their operations and reduce the manual work required to service each new customer so that they could maintain the Bunk customer experience.
Read on below to hear from Eden Bearn-Johnston, Head of Operations at Bunk, about how our collaboration turbo-charged their business at a time when it was most needed.
"From the first meeting with founders to the final meeting to sign-off work, we were dealing with intelligent and friendly professionals who quickly got to grips with the intricacies of the entire project. Each of the diverse team excelled in their role - and the project was completed efficiently.
Lola Tech’s developers were able to use their expertise to quickly suggest and implement great solutions - but more importantly, they engaged with the business model and pain points in great depth. I can’t stress how important this is - the speed at which the Lola Tech team were able to empathise with our users to conceptualise use cases and edge cases meant that their solution was robust and, ultimately, likely to be in place for a long time."
"We post all of our properties to multiple advertising portals to reach over 97% of active tenants in the UK rental market. Lola Tech helped us to expedite the process of getting our property data from our database and onto each of the advertising portals, with a bespoke integration, which drastically improved our operational efficiency. Not only did it reduce the manual input needed from our client success team for this task by around 75% - but it improved our user experience by decreasing the average time to let. These changes were a key contributor to Bunk completing an end-to-end let, from onboarding a new customer, to advertising their property, finding tenants, completing a virtual viewing and a digital offer, signing paperwork, sending payments and moving in, in under 3 days during the peak of Covid - when the UK average is over 20 days just to accept an offer, during ‘normal’ times."
