Case Study｜Mitsumoa Corporation

MeetsMore, a platform that solves everyday problems and matches businesses with clients

- What is the nature of your business?

Mr. Ando:
Mitsumore Corporation operates Mitsumore, a platform that matches service providers and clients for everyday problems such as moving, pruning gardens, and house cleaning. Our goal is to improve the operational efficiency of Japan's service industry, and we believe that our mission is to develop IT-based services to achieve this goal.

Currently, labor productivity in Japan's service industry is very low. One of the reasons for this is the time and effort required to expand sales channels. For example, time-consuming sales activities such as posting flyers and making dozens of phone calls to attract customers are a major reason for low labor productivity. By using MeetsMore, businesses can eliminate these time-consuming sales activities. As a result, businesses can spend more time on their core business and improve productivity.

- There are other platforms that connect clients and businesses, but what are some of Meetsmore's unique strengths?

Mr. Ando:
Our great strength is our UI (user interface) design, which concretizes the client's requests. There are many cases in which a client's request is not well communicated to a service provider for a problem in daily life. In contrast, Mitsumoa's UI is in the form of a question-and-answer format in which the client answers each request, and the content of the answers accurately conveys the request to the service provider.

This UI also enables comparison of quotes from different businesses. MeetsMore calculates estimates based on the amount of money set in advance by the business according to the details of the request, and displays them all at once. This allows the client to easily compare estimates. This was made possible by our company's understanding of the characteristics of each industry and our design of the UI and estimation specifications.

The management method of business meeting histories was not consistent from department to department, making it difficult to respond to problems when they occurred.

- What challenges did you face before introducing UPWARD?

Mr. Ando:
Since we operate a platform, we need to communicate with many customers on a daily basis, and communication with each customer frequently crosses departments. Nevertheless, the communication history was managed individually by each department, and the lack of sharing was an internal issue. At the time of the founding of the company, the number of customers was small and we were able to operate with this system, but as the number of customers increased, we felt that this method of operation had its limitations.
This is when we came across UPWARD.

- What did you find attractive about UPWARD?

Mr. Ando:
The first thing that struck me was the ability to integrate with other business tools we were using. For example, Mitsumoa uses a chat tool to communicate with clients, and we were able to link with that tool and check the chat history when we called up client information. I found this to be a very useful feature.
In addition, the extensive support was also a big draw for us. As I mentioned earlier, we wanted to operate in conjunction with multiple business tools, so tool setup was very important to us, and the work involved was complex. The UPWARD staff was very helpful in this situation, and we were told that they would provide a solid support system that would accompany us to the point where we would be able to operate the system as planned. We were convinced that we could operate the system with peace of mind, and we decided to install UPWARD.

Visualization of sales progress clarified goals and improved morale in the sales department.

- How are you operating after the introduction of UPWARD?

Mr. Ando:
We operate this system as a storage location for communication history with both businesses and clients who use Mitsumoa. By storing the large amount of communication that occurs daily on UPWARD, the history can be extracted in one go when a problem occurs.

Sakamoto:
UPWARD is also used as a sales management tool for registering new businesses, and since sales progress to each business can be entered into UPWARD, it is also possible to visualize the expected budget achievement on a weekly and monthly basis. The information stored in UPWARD can also be analyzed to determine what actions are necessary to achieve the goals.

- Are there any changes that have occurred within the company since the introduction of UPWARD?

Mr. Ando:
Trouble caused by overlooked communication history has been reduced Before the introduction of UPWARD, communication information for customers was stored in pieces, which frequently resulted in overlooked history, which often led to trouble. However, now that all communication history is stored on UPWARD, the same problems have been eliminated.

Sakamoto:
I feel that the morale of the sales team has also improved. Knowing how much more we have to do to achieve our goals naturally motivates the entire team. The time required to prepare materials for sales meetings has also been reduced. In the past, we had to consolidate the materials managed separately by each individual in order to create meeting materials, but now we can check the contents of all the materials at once through UPWARD and reflect them directly in our sales materials, so we can spend the time we used to spend creating materials on other tasks.

Mr. Ando:
In addition, business improvement plans are now actively discussed. Since the communication history can be checked all at once and it is easy to determine the causes of problems, more members are now proposing preventive measures.

- On the contrary, are you feeling any stress after the introduction?

Mr. Ando:
In fact, I have not heard such comments at all. Since UPWARD is linked to other tools used in the company and automatically saves the communication history, they probably don't feel that it is a hassle to do so. Of course, from an information management perspective, it is necessary to attach notes to the communication history. However, since UPWARD's memo input UI is very intuitive, there is no need to feel stressed.

Linking location information with customer information to visualize areas of weak service development.

-How do you want to develop Meetsmore in the future?

Mr. Ando:
We would like to expand the services we offer and the regions in which we operate. In particular, we would like to focus on developing services in the business field, as we have not yet reached a satisfactory volume. Ultimately, we would like to develop the service into a platform that allows customers to consistently request both daily and business services.
In order to achieve this goal, our first goal is to cover all regions for the services we currently offer.
In doing so, we would like to make effective use of UPWARD's strength, which is its ability to link location information with customer information. We feel that the ability to visualize customer information on a map is a great advantage in that it allows us to intuitively grasp the current situation. We would like to use this map function to identify areas where service development is weak and aggressively market to businesses in those areas to achieve coverage of all regions.

-Lastly, do you have any advice for those who are thinking about implementing CRM in the future?

Mr. Ando:
I think there are many companies in that type of business where CRM is the core of the business. If the tool at the core of the business cannot be operated as expected, or if it does not work well with other tools, the business efficiency of the company as a whole will be significantly reduced. When selecting a tool, please be very careful and make your decision after carefully examining not only the convenience of the tool, but also its after-sales service and other aspects.

*The names of organizations and positions in the article are as of July 2023.