After a Boston University-endorsed moving company botched the delivery of thousands of boxes last semester, the university has decided to not recommend any moving service to students in the spring, according to Office of Housing Director Marc Robillard.
But with the opening of a new Boston headquarters, storage company Collegeboxes is looking to scoop up former SmartMovers customers turned off from the company after many failed deliveries, according to Collegeboxes representatives.
In August 2006, SmartMovers experienced several computer system glitches that caused delivery delays. In a Sept. 6 Daily Free Press article, BU spokesman Colin Riley said the university intervened on behalf of students and used university trucks to transport boxes from the SmartMovers warehouse to BU.
In a January 2007 interview, Riley said the administration previously endorsed SmartMovers because it had a “generally good working history” with the company.
Storage company representatives from SmartMovers and Collegeboxes said they offer to keep students’ belongings in climate-controlled warehouses until the students return to school in the fall.
Collegeboxes CEO Scott Neuberger said SmartMovers was the “primary vender at BU.”
“We did provide services at BU,” Neuberger said, “but [SmartMovers] literally owned BU.”
SmartMovers owner Larry Byron said the shipping delay last August was “a painful learning experience” for the company.
“We care very deeply about providing good service,” he said, “and obviously we didn’t choose that in August. But we’ve been around a long time, and we’ll be around even longer.”
SmartMovers has stored boxes for students in the Boston area for the past 12 years. Despite the delayed service last fall, Byron said SmartMovers has about 20 BU study-abroad customers, a similar amount to previous years.
“A few people had delayed service,” he said, “but they’ve been with us long enough, so they understand that things happen. People have been very loyal and understanding.”
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Collegeboxes’s new Boston headquarters could mean competition for SmartMovers, as the largest storage company in the country, Neuberger said. He said the company decided to move to Boston because the city has the “best potential market” for storage companies.
“It’s pretty much become our largest city,” he said. “We’re Red Sox fans now, so we couldn’t see ourselves living anywhere else.”
Neuberger said Collegeboxes will not run into the same mistakes made by SmartMovers because the organizations run their operations differently.
“There are a few significant differences in our business models,” he said. “We are compartmentalizing our operations. We hire a moving company for each specific school. If there’s a failure at one school, it’s impossible for that to bleed into another school.”
Instead of relying on one group of movers, Collegeboxes employs local moving companies in every city, Neuberger said. He said SmartMovers has one central warehouse and a single team of movers, and the company’s delay at BU last fall may have caused it to fall behind in meeting deadlines at other Boston schools.
Collegeboxes uses a GPS system to monitor where trucks are traveling via the drivers’ cell phones. Text messages are sent to students to let them know when the moving truck is arriving.
“We try to excel the service level of anybody else,” Neuberger said.
Despite Neuberger’s confidence in the success of Collegeboxes’s operations, members of Harvard University’s Undergraduate Council have expressed skepticism.
According to a November 2006 article in The Harvard Crimson, the Harvard Undergraduate Council asked all organizations affiliated with the university to abandon their connection to Collegeboxes after 22 Harvard students said the company failed to deliver insurance claim checks and packages on time.
Neuberger told the Crimson the insurance checks have been paid, and the remainder of Collegeboxes’s 600 customers at Harvard did not have any problems with the company’s service.