Six years ago, three entrepreneurs came together with a dream. They wanted to create a camera rental house that doesn’t just provide gear but also provides high levels of customer service. They started equipment.cafe with Booqable, and they’ve grown incredibly over the past few years.
Customer service is more critical in rentals than almost any other business because of multiple interactions. In retail, customers often only interact with staff once to buy items, whereas, in rentals, they will interact at pickup and return. In addition, there is fewer staff in rental businesses, so building meaningful relationships is vital to success.
equipment.cafe
equipment.cafe was founded in 2016 by three entrepreneurs who saw a rapidly changing audiovisual market and developed a plan to make it easier to navigate. Customer service was at the core of this plan as new equipment appears every week in the market, so customers need a reliable place to decide what is best for the job at hand.
They rent out everything you need to shoot a film, except actors, of course. If you browse through their website, you will find over 2,000 unique products available on any given day. These include cameras, lenses, tripods, lights, batteries, sound recorders, microphones, timecode generators, radios, and intercom systems.
All of their equipment is from industry leaders like Sony, Canon, Red, Arri, Blackmagic, Leica, and Apple. They provide this equipment along with a professional service at every level of the industry. Their customers range from students making projects for university to full-scale productions and companies hosting live streaming events.
So, it makes sense then that assisting customers to a high level is key to daily operations. They hired people with significant experience in the industry to provide the necessary service, including camera assistants, camera operators, and sound engineers. This has enabled them to provide excellent advice to thousands of customers.
10,000 stock items and counting
Of course, to provide excellent customer service, they needed a robust inventory management system. With over 2,000 unique products and over 10,000 unique stock items, they needed rental software to scale with them and handle an increasingly large inventory without skipping a beat.
The most critical aspect of customer experience is making sure everything is available when customers need it. Therefore, eliminating the possibility to overbook items was a significant feature of Booqable that stood out to them. This has only improved over the years with the introduction of live availability, making it easier than ever to manage.
A life-saving feature for equipment.cafe when it was released was barcode scanning. It has improved their interactions with customers by speeding up pickups and returns and reducing human error when determining if the right equipment has been handed out and returned.
A unique online rental experience
In addition to their crazy focus on customer service, they also wanted to create a unique online rental experience. To achieve this, they chose Booqable for its professional embeddable online store components that have allowed them to create the best camera rental experience possible.
Their website features product photos that the staff at the equipment.cafe has taken to show customers exactly what they are getting. These photos are accompanied by detailed product descriptions and manuals that advise customers. Finally, each product page includes compatible products such as batteries, memory cards, and recommended lenses.
Customers love using the website to build their camera packages quickly and easily. The access to unique product images and descriptions shows that equipment. cafe is passionate about cameras and audio equipment and builds trust with customers.
