ClickMechanic is a simple solution to the age-old problem of getting an honest, trustworthy and transparent mechanic for your car. The site, which was founded in 2012, is the UK’s leading platform that connects car owners needing repairs, servicing, and inspections with registered mechanics. ClickMechanic boasts an extensive network of freelance mobile mechanics, allowing customers to get instant, industry standard approved quotes and everything can be booked online!
The Objective
- Find an inexpensive communication tool other than email
- Find an effective way to contact their large network of mechanics
- To free up their Customer Experience Team’s time
- Find a solution that doesn’t need to involve their engineering team
The Plan
We spoke to Jake Mallet, the Growth Manager at ClickMechanic, about why they decided to use SMS as one of their communication channels, and how using FireText has helped them to achieve their goals.
Jake said; “we have a large network of mechanics, and have found that whilst some of them are happy to communicate with us via email, others prefer phone calls and SMS. Many of our communications are automated, but when we made changes to their app or updated them about something, we were struggling to do so via email newsletters, and calling every mechanic wasn’t feasible.”
He explained; “we were looking for something inexpensive with the functionality to include custom fields and links, and most importantly, that could be put into practice without the engineering team. We came to the conclusion that SMS was the right solution for us however, we were concerned that we wouldn’t be able to measure the additional benefit in uplift from SMS, in the same way that we’re able to track every stage of a user’s journey in email.”
Jake came across FireText on a Google search and said that it seemed to tick all of their boxes. After looking at a number of other providers, Jake said, “FireText stood out as the obvious choice because of their live chat support.” He explained, “we were able to achieve our goal leaning on FireText whenever we needed it, and the responses were instant and clear.” In addition, he said that they were able to “keep engineers focused on other tasks as FireText were able to ensure that the lists of phone numbers were uploaded properly and answer any other questions that we had.”
“Sending out a bulk SMS was actually far easier than envisaged.”
The Message
“Hi Ben, we’ve made some important changes to the App & Job notifications. Check your email or this link to find out more http://fts.ms/Xc5PAJ”
The Results
Jake explained, “The key for us, is that we have been able to communicate better with some of our mechanics. Quite often we would make an update to the App and would have mechanics calling in to ask what was going on, despite receiving an email about it.”
They have managed to reduce the amount of enquiries about new updates by an impressive 50%, which has allowed the Customer Experience Team to focus on other tasks.
Jake concludes, “ultimately however, mechanics are the lifeblood of the business, so being able to communicate with them faster and more effectively is invaluable in itself.”