car-sharing
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Shapewear, Roller Coasters, and Borrowed Cars Walk Into a Contact Center
Three companies that couldn't look less alike — SPANX in shapewear, Herschend in theme parks, and Turo in car sharing — turn out to share the same architecture underneath: a CRM-first, cloud-native contact center on UJET, no stored PII, deployment measured in weeks or hours, and one hard number each that moved. This profile examines the common pattern behind three very different customer-experience turnarounds.
Upshift
Upshift is a San Francisco car subscription service for people who drive a few days a month but don't want the cost and hassle of owning a car. Members pick a flexible monthly plan, get a clean late-model hybrid (Toyota Prius or Corolla Hybrid) delivered with insurance, maintenance, and refueling included, and skip parking tickets, repairs, and long-term loans. Founded in 2012 by Ezra Goldman and Ayako Hiwasa, the company frames itself as 'the ownership alternative for low-mileage city drivers' and is positioning for an autonomous, connected, electrified future of car non-ownership.
Turo
Turo is the world's largest peer-to-peer car-sharing marketplace, connecting people who want to rent a car with everyday car owners who list their vehicles. Instead of a fleet of identical sedans behind an airport counter, Turo offers roughly 340,000 cars across 1,600 makes and models - from electric Teslas and pickup trucks to convertibles and classic exotics - bookable through an app or website. The platform handles transactions, host protection plans, liability insurance and roadside assistance, letting owners earn income from idle cars and guests find the exact vehicle they want, often delivered to the airport or their door.
Ezra Goldman
Ezra Goldman is the co-founder and CEO of Upshift, a San Francisco-based company reinventing how city dwellers access cars. Rather than owning or leasing a vehicle full-time, Upshift members subscribe to a car that appears at their door when needed and vanishes when they don't - a fractional model that eliminates insurance headaches, maintenance costs, and the guilt of a depreciating asset sitting idle 95% of the time. Goldman brings 25+ years of shared-transportation obsession to the role, starting with a communist-themed campus bikeshare in 1999, through an MIT master's in urban planning, a PhD stint in Copenhagen studying why Danes ride bikes, and stints at City CarShare and ReachNow before building Upshift into a platform backed by MINI (BMW), Ford, and thousands of crowdfunding investors.
Andre Haddad
Andre Haddad is the CEO and All Star Host of Turo, the world's largest peer-to-peer car-sharing marketplace. A Lebanese-born, HEC Paris-educated entrepreneur who survived Beirut's civil war, co-founded and sold iBazar to eBay for $140 million, and then spent a decade inside eBay before taking the helm of Turo in 2011. Under his leadership, Turo has grown from a niche car-sharing startup into a global platform operating in the US, UK, Canada, France, and Australia, generating nearly $1 billion in annual revenue and empowering hundreds of thousands of hosts worldwide.