Standing Tall

With a leg-up from ups, Roll-A-Bout gets its customers back on their feet

It's inevitable. People sprain their ankles. They break bones in their feet. They tear tendons and need surgery. When someone needs to keep their weight off of one leg, they often turn to crutches, walkers or wheelchairs. But these mobility aids can lead to problems of their own, such as sprained wrists and loss of conditioning.

Roll-A-Bout offers an alternative - a four-wheeled device that can support one leg at the knee, leaving the other leg free to walk normally. With a handle and brake, it's easy to maneuver.

To get their products to their customers, who are often housebound after surgery or injury, the company turned to UPS.

Fast delivery

Roll-A-Bout's customers need their products quickly. But Dominick Venezia, Roll-A-Bout's general manager, estimates that 5 percent of their orders have address-related problems such as missing apartment numbers or incorrect street addresses. With UPS Quantum View®, Roll-A-Bout's staff can discover these problems immediately.

"Before, we had to wait for the customer to call, then begin address verification research. We were automatically a day behind. Now, Quantum View alerts us when there's a problem. Because Quantum View gets us that information quickly, we can often research and solve the problem and have the package delivered the same day or the following day without contacting the customer at all," Venezia says.

Plus, Quantum View automatically sends the customer an e-mail with the tracking number so they can monitor their shipment's progress online. "That has eliminated 50 percent of phone calls from people checking on the progress of their shipments," Venezia says.

Rental returns

Most of Roll-A-Bout's customers need their products for only a limited time until they are back on their feet. So Roll-A-Bout offers weekly rentals of its products, and makes returning them convenient and easy.

In the past, customers had to call Roll-A-Bout to receive return shipping instructions. These phone calls were inconvenient for customers, and pulled Roll-A-Bout's staff away from more productive tasks.

Roll-A-Bout now makes it easy for customers to send back items by including a prepaid UPS Returns® label with the outgoing shipment. The customer simply repackages the device in its original box, applies the return label. They can then give it to any UPS driver or take it to any The UPS Store®, UPS Customer Center, Office Depot or Staples location, or any UPS Authorized Shipping Outlet.

"I would say that between Quantum View and UPS Returns we've gained enough efficiency to re-assign one fulltime person to other tasks," Venezia says.

Better billing

Online billing is another productivity boosting tool. "We love the online billing and the billing analysis tool. We use those all the time," Venezia says. "It takes 30 seconds to scan the bill as opposed to 10 to 20 minutes going line by line."

The company also appreciates the ecofriendly aspect of online billing. "We try to be as environmentally aware as possible," Venezia says. Online billing eliminates paper invoices, and staffers can run searches on the computer without printing out pages.

With help from UPS, Roll-A-Bout can keep its business - and its customers - rolling along smoothly. "The UPS services are both a convenience for our customers and a productivity advantage for us," Venezia says.