How Solving The Age-Old Lost And Found Dilemma Enhances Customer Experience

Most of us have lost something valuable or sentimental while away. And even if you’re sure where you lost it—the hotel, the airport, or the music venue—these places have no system to record and track these items. They search a lost and found box or closet, take your contact information, and that’s the last you hear from them.

Lost and found is a decade-long problem; until recently, no business had stepped forward to solve it. All this changed with the arrival of Boomerang. In September 2020, entrepreneur Skyler Logsdon was celebrating his 28th birthday with friends, including two of his closest friends Augustine Diep-Tran and Philip Inghelbrecht. All three were previously founders or leaders of successful companies, including Shazam, which Apple acquired for $400 million, TrueCar, Tatari, and YourMechanic, which acquired Wrench.

“We were sitting around the pool talking about ideas,” says Logsdon. “We were all aware of the lost and found problem. People don’t know what to do when they lose something. Or when they find something. They’ll post on Craigslist or Facebook, or Next Door; anywhere they can post, but none of these companies it is lost and found. The person who lost the object and the person who found it never meet.”

This conversation led to a deep dive into the industry to understand why it was so broken and how they could fix it. They realized that lost items are not just a problem for people who lose their possessions; it’s fundamentally a huge customer service problem that businesses of all sizes face. “If you want to solve lost property, you have to help these businesses first,” says Logsdon. “We set out to build the software they need to organize their lost and found items instead of just throwing them in a box.”

They launched Boomerang in November 2021 with a seed round of $2.8 million backed by venture funds and angel investors, including GGV Capital, Relay Ventures and Animal Capital. The founders hired a team of engineers to begin product development, and in May 2022, the product, based on machine learning, went live.

Boomerang’s self-service lost property management software product can organize a company’s lost property inventory management for lost item claims in a single view, allowing for much faster matching. It also offers a fully managed lost and found service for organizations that deal with hundreds of lost items every week, such as universities, stadiums and transport centres.

“We started with smaller inventory companies, like stadiums that have a home game once a week, or the NFL, every other week,” says Logsdon. “On game day, you might get a flood of 100 or more lost item claims, and that’s where our model starts to learn. We were working with stadiums like the Atlanta Hawks and the Cleveland Browns, and from there we started looking at universities like UC Berkeley and Virginia State. Boomerang combined items much faster and by January of this year we were ready for the bigs and took our first batch of airports.”

At Syracuse Hancock International Airport (SYR), as with any organization that transports people, items are lost daily at various points in their customers’ journeys. The three main points are at the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) checkpoint, on the plane, or anywhere else in the airport. And as SYR marketing and communications specialist Matthew Szwejbka explains, the airport only handles lost and found items that fall into the latter category.

He says: “We haven’t measured it at all. Someone would call the already overworked Airport Security Officers (ASOs) working the desk that day and describe the item they had lost. The ASO would then rummage through the lost item inventory for a match.”

In January of this year, SYR partnered with Boomerang to increase visibility into various metrics including claim count, claim breakdown, inventory count, inventory breakdown and match rates . It has already delivered results, including a 50% reduction in time spent on lost information and a 20% increase in return rates from month one to month two.

“Now, the customer simply enters a photo and description of their item, and all the work of matching that lost and found claim with an actual item in our inventory is handled by artificial intelligence,” says Szwejbka. “It significantly reduces the burden on our ASOs and provides a consistent customer experience. It also enhances our brand as people are willing to drive to the airport, giving them the best customer experience.”

Organizations using Boomerang’s technology can accept claims 24/7, not just when they have staff. Communications are also streamlined as the system collects shipping details, shipping payment, dispatches the item and triggers a customer email with the tracking number, reducing call logs and emails electronic Boomerang now has a team of 12 people and has its sights set on other sectors of the industry.

“If you want to solve lost items, if you want to solve this black hole problem where people can’t trust that you have their item, you need a process,” says Logsdon. “And it’s not just about lost items with great sentimental or monetary value. Someone went to a concert and lost their diabetes kit. Imagine what it would have been like if they hadn’t been able to get him back. Being able to get it back quickly was magical. These moments drive the team and make all the hard work and risk worth it.”