Moving Company Answering Service | Estimate Calls Answered Live
Movers & Relocation
A move has a date on it, and that single fact changes the whole sales dynamic. Nobody shopping for a mover is browsing — they have a closing, a lease end or a job start, and they sit down and call four companies in one go. The one that answers with a person, asks the right questions and gets a survey on the calendar is usually the one that books, because by the time the other three return the call the caller has already had a real conversation with somebody else.
Global Empire Corporation answers moving company lines the way a good estimator would open the call — capturing the origin, destination, date, home size and access details a real estimate depends on, booking the virtual or in-home survey rather than guessing at a price, and keeping move-day chaos on a separate path from the sales line so the two never block each other.
- Live answering during move days, weekends and month-end, when the office is empty and the calls are worth most
- Surveys booked on the call — virtual or in-home — instead of a callback that arrives after three competitors have quoted
- Move-day exception calls kept on their own path so a crew running late never sits behind a sales inquiry
- Every inquiry captured with its lead source, so you can see which of the leads you pay for are actually being answered
- 1.1B+
- Transactions Processed
- 11+
- Contact Centers Worldwide
- 27
- Service in 27+ Languages
- 35.5k+
- Over 35000 Happy Employees
- 10M+
- New Customers Acquired
Your Phone Rings Loudest on the Days Nobody Is in the Office
Look at where a moving company's people physically are on a Saturday at the end of June. On trucks, on stairs, in a customer's driveway waiting on a building elevator reservation. The office is empty, or it is one dispatcher fielding three crews at once — and that is precisely the window when next month's estimating calls arrive, because the people planning a move are off work and finally have time to make them. The busiest operating day of your month is the same day your sales line goes unanswered, and nothing about the way the work is scheduled will ever untangle those two.
The consequence is not a lost call, it is a lost slot on a specific date. Moving demand piles onto the end of the month, onto weekends and onto the summer, so the calls you drop are disproportionately for the dates you most want to fill, and a caller who books elsewhere is gone permanently rather than deferred — you cannot win them back next week, because next week they have moved. Voicemail rarely helps. A comparison shopper with a deadline does not leave a message for the mover who did not pick up.
For local movers, long-distance carriers, agents and packing crews
What Happens on the Call While Your Whole Office Is on a Truck
Book the Survey, Do Not Quote the Move
The caller wants a number and you cannot responsibly give one from a phone description. Agents are trained to move the conversation to the survey — virtual walkthrough or in-home visit, whichever you offer — and to book it while the caller is engaged, rather than promising a price and creating an expectation your estimator then has to break.
The Access Questions That Decide Everything
Stairs or elevator at both ends, floor number, whether the elevator has to be reserved, how far the truck can park from the door, permit or loading-zone restrictions, gate codes and HOA rules. These are the details that turn a profitable local job into a long-carry disaster, and they get asked on the first call rather than discovered on move morning.
Local Versus Long Distance, Sorted at Intake
The two run on different pricing models, different crews and different paperwork, so agents establish origin and destination early and route accordingly. An interstate inquiry goes to whoever handles interstate, with the detail that side needs, instead of being estimated as though it were an hourly job across town.
Inventory, Specialty Items and Packing
Bedrooms and rough volume, plus the specific things that change the crew and the truck — a piano, a gun safe, a pool table, a treadmill, appliances that need disconnection, a garage or storage unit nobody mentioned. Agents also capture whether the customer wants full pack, partial pack or self-pack, and whether materials are needed.
Move-Day Exceptions and Crew ETA Calls
On the day itself the calls change character completely: where is my truck, we are stuck behind an elevator, the building will not let us load. These are triaged to your dispatcher or your on-call lead under rules you set, and they never wait in the same queue as an estimate inquiry, because one of them is a customer with your furniture in transit.
Certificates of Insurance and Claims Intake
A building demanding a certificate of insurance with exact wording before it will release the freight elevator is a deadline, not a message, and it goes straight to whoever issues yours. Post-move damage calls are captured to your claims process — item, date, crew, what happened, photographs requested — and never adjudicated or valued on the phone.
Working Inside SmartMoving, Supermove, MoversSuite or Moveware
The moving industry has real systems and a wide spread in who uses them. Larger and van-line-affiliated operations tend to run MoversSuite or Moveware; growing independents are commonly on SmartMoving or Supermove. Where you run one of these, agents create the lead directly in it — customer, origin and destination, date, inventory notes, access details, lead source — and book the survey on the estimator's calendar, so the record your sales team opens on Monday is complete and nobody has to phone the customer back to ask the same questions again.
Plenty of good moving companies run none of the above. They keep a shared calendar, a spreadsheet and a job folder, and there is nothing wrong with that at their size — it just means the handoff, not the integration, is the thing to design. In that case we agree the exact fields every inquiry must carry, the format they arrive in, where they land, and who owns them on your side, and we tag every call with its lead source anyway. That tagging alone often pays for the service, because it is usually the first time an owner can see which advertising produced calls that were actually answered.
- SmartMoving and Supermove — leads created and surveys booked directly on the estimator's calendar
- MoversSuite and Moveware for van-line agents and larger operations, scoped to intake and scheduling
- No system in place — structured intake delivered to a shared inbox or calendar in a fixed format your office can work from
- Lead source captured on every call, so paid leads, referrals and organic inquiries can be told apart
What an Answering Service Will Not Say on a Household Goods Move
Interstate household goods moves are federally regulated. A mover crossing state lines operates under the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration's household goods rules, which cover USDOT registration and operating authority as well as the consumer disclosures a customer must receive — including the booklet FMCSA requires movers to provide, Your Rights and Responsibilities When You Move. Intrastate moving is a separate regime entirely, licensed state by state and often administered through a state public utilities commission or department of transportation, with its own rules on estimates, tariffs and complaint handling.
For a phone line the practical consequence is narrow and specific, and it is why the script is written the way it is. Agents do not state whether your company holds authority for a particular lane, do not give a binding or non-binding estimate, and do not characterize what your valuation coverage would pay on a damaged item — each of those is a representation with regulatory weight that belongs to you and your estimators, not to an intake agent. What agents do is capture the move accurately, book the survey and trigger whatever disclosure step your own process defines so the paperwork sequence starts on time. These requirements differ by state and change; confirm your current obligations with your own counsel.
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Frequently asked questions
Can your agents give a customer a price over the phone?
No, and for a mover that is the correct behavior rather than a limitation. A price quoted from a phone description is either high enough to lose the job or low enough to be revised later, and the revision is where complaints and cancellations come from. Agents are trained to do what a good estimator does on a first call: establish the move, ask the access and inventory questions, explain how your survey works, and book it. The conversion goal is a scheduled survey, not a number.
Do we need 24/7 answering for a moving company?
Probably not overnight, and a provider pushing round-the-clock coverage on a local mover is selling hours. Your real gap is early morning through evening, Saturday, and the last week of the month — the windows where crews are out, the office is empty and the estimating calls land. Start there. Interstate operations with customers in other time zones, or companies whose shipments are in transit over several days, have a genuine overnight case; a three-truck local mover generally does not, and the call log will tell you within a couple of months.
What happens when a customer calls on move day and the crew is running late?
That call takes a different path from the moment it is identified. Agents confirm the job, get the customer's status, and reach your dispatcher or on-call lead by the method and within the window you set, rather than taking a message that sits behind three estimate inquiries. Where you allow it they relay a crew ETA; where you do not, they commit to a callback from dispatch and log it. The rule to agree up front is who gets woken and how quickly, because on move day nothing else matters.
How do you handle long-distance inquiries differently from local moves?
They are separated at intake by origin and destination, because almost everything downstream differs — weight-based rather than hourly pricing, a delivery spread instead of a single day, interstate paperwork, and often a different person in your office. Agents capture the additional detail that side needs, including flexibility on delivery dates and any storage-in-transit requirement, and route the inquiry to whoever handles interstate. Treating a cross-country move as a big local job is the most common way a moving lead is lost between the phone and the estimator.
Can you create the lead directly in SmartMoving or Supermove?
In most cases yes — customer details, origin and destination, date, home size, access notes, specialty items, lead source, and the survey booked on the estimator's calendar. That is worth insisting on, because an intake that lands as an email your office retypes loses fields and produces callbacks. If you run MoversSuite or Moveware, scope is agreed with whoever administers it. If you run no system at all, we fix the field list and the delivery format instead, which gets you most of the same benefit.
Will you take damage claims after a move?
Intake only, and the boundary matters. Agents capture the job, the date, the crew, the item, what happened and the customer's contact details, request photographs into your process, and confirm the next step your policy defines. They do not accept liability, estimate a settlement, explain what your valuation coverage pays, or tell a customer whether the claim will succeed. A calm, complete intake taken the day the customer calls is worth a great deal to whoever handles the claim afterward — and it keeps that conversation off your dispatcher's phone.
Our volume spikes at the end of the month. Can coverage flex with that?
That is most of the reason to do this rather than hire. Moving volume concentrates on month-end, weekends and the summer, and staffing an office for the last week of June leaves you overstaffed for the first three weeks of February. Coverage is planned against your own pattern — the specific days and hours where your call log shows abandonment — and widened for peak season rather than held flat all year. We would ask for twelve months of call data before proposing hours, not a monthly average.
What does a moving company answering service cost?
It follows the program rather than a per-call rate: the hours and days covered, call volume and how sharply it peaks around month-end and summer, whether agents book surveys in your software or hand structured intake to your office, whether move-day dispatch escalation and claims intake are in scope, and whether interstate inquiries need their own deeper script. A local mover buying weekend and evening cover is a different program from an interstate agent covering seven days. We quote per company after seeing your call pattern.
TESTIMONIALS
Our trusted clients
Global Empire provides reliable 24/7 coverage with live support when it matters most. Their breadth of service, professionalism, and ability to answer calls quickly has made a major difference for our organization. We’re very happy with the partnership and would recommend them confidently.
Wait times no longer exist with the service Global Empire provides. We have cut labor costs dramatically, eliminated overhead from dispatch staffing, and our clients are getting picked up quicker. Spending less while improving service has become the backbone of our business.
We are not only meeting but exceeding our service level objectives. Global Empire resolves many calls without needing a live agent, and the calls that require support are answered quickly and handled faster than before. Their reporting gives us visibility anytime we need it.
We set very challenging service level objectives and insist on those standards being met. At first we were unsure if Global Empire could consistently deliver at that level, but they proved they could. Based on performance and reliability, we know we made the right decision.
Service matters greatly for customer loyalty and experience, and Global Empire provides exactly the professional support required. We’re confident we achieve more value in our contact center because of the strategic partnership and the consistency of their service.
During our recent flood disaster, Global Empire provided messaging services vital to our communications management. Their quick, efficient, and professional response stood out throughout the crisis. In situations like this, service quality is not taken for granted — it’s recognized.
Excellent service — we consistently receive comments about how professional and friendly their agents are. To our customers, it feels seamless and they assume the people answering are part of our in-office team. It has worked out far better than we thought possible.
Global Empire has provided essential call center services for over a decade, responding to medical and non-medical emergencies with accuracy and professionalism. Their commitment to quality and continuous learning is clearly reflected in the service they deliver.
I never realized how much overtime we were paying until we started using Global Empire. We were able to eliminate overtime completely while improving how calls are handled. Now our staff can focus on other important tasks that keep our customers happy.
I wasn’t using all the options Global Empire offered until one of their representatives noticed and reached out. Based on their recommendations, we made several changes that saved money and improved response time. Customers now comment on how efficiently our business runs.
We believe excellent customer service provides the sharpest competitive edge. Global Empire shares that same vision and works closely with us to deliver the best possible service quality. Their partnership supports our ongoing commitment to excellence.
The main reason we work with Global Empire is the ‘red carpet’ treatment. They have the best group of agents I’ve worked with in over 20 years, and they consistently maintain high standards for compliance and customer interactions. They lead by example.
Efficient, professional service with a personal touch. It’s rare to find a provider that consistently delivers both quality and responsiveness at this level.
Over the years I’ve been impressed with the professionally trained staff at Global Empire. Our customers are often anxious or angry, and their team consistently puts them at ease. In two decades, we have never had a customer complaint — which says everything.
As we expanded from Europe into North America, we knew customer service and technical support would be critical to success. We were impressed to learn Global Empire was handling support for a market leader. After working with them, it’s clear why — their service sets the standard.
One of our members struggled with registration and called our toll-free number. The Global Empire agent remained calm, extremely helpful, and professional throughout a long troubleshooting process. Because of that call, the customer remained loyal — and that is a huge asset.
Global Empire is over-delivering on SPH and sales targets. Their performance has helped us reduce acquisition costs significantly, and they have proven to be the missing link in our growth strategy.
I can’t believe we didn’t use Global Empire sooner. Since joining, our order accuracy improved, wait time is virtually gone, and customers receive their orders correctly and on time. This partnership has had a major impact on our national pizza business.
Because of their experience in the energy industry, Global Empire has become a valued marketing partner. Their call center solutions help us acquire customers, retain them, and provide quality service after the sale — 24 hours a day.
Our business relationship with Global Empire has been long and very satisfying. Their employees deserve full credit for the professionalism and consistency they bring to every interaction. I know firsthand how stressful frontline work can be, and their team delivers every time.
Global Empire has been an integral part of our business for years. Our customers expect to speak with someone who can assist immediately, and their team consistently delivers. They maintain professionalism, empathy, and flexibility, making it easy to work together.
With so much outsourcing in the answering services space, it was a relief to find a provider that is truly efficient. The pricing is excellent, onboarding was smooth, and our clients were far happier speaking to a live operator instead of voicemail.
We have partnered with Global Empire for over 15 years and they remain a crucial part of our 24/7 operations. They support multiple sites across states, and we couldn’t be happier with their service, reliability, and long-term consistency.