$8,000 in 8 minutes with BikeSource Charlotte - Part 1
In this blog post we bring to you our last Specialized interview (for now😏), and we were lucky enough to be able to sit with Donald from BikeSource Charlotte to have a nice chat about all things texting.
We were joined by Matt and Connor from Specialized corporate and we were able to deep dive into two different perspectives on how to work with Ikeono and how corporate and retail teams can work together to benefit from all of Ikeono’s ecosystem.
Donald also brings an interesting point of view to the bike shop with his dealership days with Freightliner trucks and Caterpillar equipment. We talk about what it looks like to implement a text messaging platform, how Donald handles scheduling as the largest Specialized dealer in the region, and we also give you a sneak peek into the new Ikeono portal 👀.
This is only part 1 of our interview and after we take a Bojangles break, we can’t wait to bring you part 2.
Q: What was implementing Ikeono like?
Donald: I'll give you some background, Jeremiah (service manager) and I have been here for a long time.
We went live on Lightspeed just a little over a year ago, and we had come from our old custom system and used ZipWhip as a sort of half solution.
But not everybody used it because it was cumbersome. It just didn't work very well for us.
Brett: Was there any integration between the custom system and ZipWhip?
Donald: No, zero. And at the same time, corporate was suggesting to implement another system on top of the new POS. There was a big push.
I didn't like the look of it. I felt like what it was was one system piled on top of another system.
Matt: And I think the motivation for that system wasn't even necessarily for texting, it was more about scheduling.
Donald: It was, but it got us really kind of talking about how our service system should be working.
What Jeremiah discovered was that there was going to be a lot of duplication of effort and he was gonna have to maintain two things.
So we said no, and we knew that Lightspeed had an integrated solution for text messaging. And then very quickly we just saw how powerful it was.
My inventory receiver said Ikeono saves him a ton of time every day, just being able to hit that button to say this thing is here, send a text message, the customer gets it, and he doesn't have to do another thing.
He prints off a piece of paper, tosses it in the bin and he's done with that.
Whereas before he was wasting time playing phone tag and it was just a giant pain in the butt.
Q: How do you manage your time with repairs? What’s the best way to schedule them?
Brett: We started with scheduling, but we found it created more issues than it ever solved. I lost my hair trying to figure out how to implement it.
Donald: So we were sold on the schedule module with that other software, and yea you can use it but you have to break it to do it.
It was just not worth it.
Matt: I personally tried to shoot that thing down as a whole because we were adding to our tech stack that's gonna create complexity.
And we had tried it in Costa Mesa and Santa Monica, and they hated it.
Brett: One of the challenges with scheduling softwares is that they give the customer too much control.
Donald: So that was the other piece I was gonna say, another location was massively excited about the customer being able to schedule their repair.
But the customer doesn't usually know what they need to have done to the bike or they can’t get their availability right. People can barely tell a doctor's office that they're not gonna make an appointment.
Matt: I mean, it's a classic case of someone coming in with a flat tire and you check their chain gap and it's like stretched to 1.75.
Brett: How we envision scheduling is that it’s not about managing the workload as much as it is managing that customer experience.
We did it in the courts. I built the scheduling system that juvenile courts in Colorado used, and it was telling you that if you showed up on Tuesday at 1 p.m. you could expect your case to be heard within a two hour time frame.
It didn't guarantee anything. They just knew when and where to show up.
Donald: Well, one of my weekend guys for the longest time is actually a service manager in the automotive industry, and he says we don't schedule service, we schedule drop offs.
Brett: Exactly.
Donald: Yes, we will have a person here available to speak to you and right, and take in your repair and that is all they guarantee, that is all they schedule.
Brett: That is what we imagine for scheduling and doing it where you can do it easily in the Ikeono ecosystem within Lightspeed.
Donald: And my weekend guy actually says, only about 60% of the time the person will show up. So 40% of schedule drop offs never show up.
Q: Have customers become demanding on knowing where you’re at with their repairs?
Brett: The past three years have just been absolutely crazy. You can't get parts. Things are taking months, have customers become calmer because they're more accustomed to waiting longer or they become more demanding because Amazon makes them want things even faster?
Donald: Yes, but we also create realistic expectations for ourselves when things happen here.
I don't want any of these folks to feel like they got to be perfect every day, every time. That's just not what our industry is about. We're not curing cancer, we're not fixing broken bones, we're taking care of bikes.
A lot of it is kind of figuring out at the beginning of the process who that customer is.
We've got a bulk of our customers that we know we have experience with. And so we know how to deal with them on a fairly regular basis.
So we know, with customer A, we're going to see him at the beginning and then we're gonna send him a little note saying, hey, this is what we found with your bike and this is what's gonna have to happen next.
And then we don't have to talk to him again, and that's all he needs. But if we forget to tell him that this is what we're gonna do in that text message. We're gonna hear from him every day until he picks his bike up.
But other customers, they'll text us almost every day like, hey, where's my bike? How's my bike doing?
Some of that is almost at the per customer basis of how you're gonna have to manage each one.
Brett: How do you know? Is it just experience?
Donald: Yea, just experience.
In the old system, we had a way to segment customers, but that creates an idea that the customer is going to behave like that every time and, that’s unfair to that customer because we might have caught him on a bad day the first time. So we quit doing that.
Everybody has a bad day and sometimes their bad day ends up in here and we want to give them a little bit of grace.
How quickly should messages be answered in general?
Donald: So back in the day, Matt would say we really want to try to be like the automotive industry and have like a 15 minute response on these text messages and the whole time I'm sitting here thinking: god, what in the hell has he never been in a bike shop? What is wrong with that guy?
I was like, this isn't an auto dealer. So then over time we realized the importance of that.
Matt: I never said it was realistic.
Donald: I was like he is out of his damn mind but now when you hear a bing🔔, people beeline for the computer to see what it is and who, who it might have been.
That thing bings🔔 all day long in the service department, they'll drop what they're doing and just walk over to see what it is.
Brett: Is that good or bad?
Donald: I think it is awesome because again, it goes back.
Matt: I personally think it's critically important and there's data that backs that up.
Donald: Like I said, originally when you said that I was like, oh God, that guy, what is he talking about?
Matt: So what changed your mind on it then?
Donald: Just living with it. So hear this, Monday morning, we got a text message saying: Hey, I was in on Saturday, I bought a Creo for my friend. I wanna get one too.
I responded to it because I saw it as I came in, and sent her off a Stripe deposit for it.
Created a layaway, and sold a bike in about eight minutes of my time in the morning. And that was it.
Brett: Title of the blog post, eight grand in eight minutes, baby!
Donald: That's the thing, if I had ignored it, who knows what may have happened?
Matt: Here's a question I have for you just based on this, now that you believe it is entirely possible to respond within 15 minutes and agree that it's important.
For a shop that claims that they don't have the capability to do that because if everyone that's working in the store is tied up with a customer and they hear bing🔔, they're not gonna go back until they're done working with customers.
What do you think of that?
Donald: That is real. There is a certain amount of reality in that, but it’s like any learned behavior.
We walk by a computer on our floor, should we not just glance at it?
What messages are in there? When you're walking back a bike from here to there and you take a quick peek at the two computers that are sitting leading into the service department to quickly just check it to see where it is.
And I am lucky, I've got an amazing service manager and an amazing assistant manager that are on top of everything and don't let anything slip by.
Q: What to expect with the new Ikeono portal?
Brett: So we made a lot of decisions early on that beholden us to Lightspeed and it really kind of pigeonholed us. We are going agnostic to be able to service the entire bike industry and not only the shops that are using Lightspeed.
So there’s a brand new Ikeono portal. We're introducing the notion of sub inboxes because one of the big complaints we've had is that everything funnels into one.
And so you get service people that are overwhelmed because they're trying to filter through sales questions.
You get sales people who are overwhelmed because they don't know what's going on in service.
So there's gonna be a notion of sub inboxes where you can assign conversations to those inboxes and they stay there until they're either closed out or moved to a different inbox.
And this will allow service to kind of funnel their conversations that they care about into their own little sub inbox.
So it will still be kind of a general inbox to keep an eye on everything from a management perspective.
Donald: So in the morning when we come in, if we see five notifications, we can choose this is for service, this is for sales and then it'll pop up in there.
Brett: Exactly!
Ikeono’s new portal integrated directly in Lightspeed R-Series point of sale
Donald: We sort of do that with tags today.
Brett: Yeah, and this is an evolution of that. We've been looking at tags to see how people have been using them. Now, Service can see they have three unread conversations in just their inbox so that it’s not overwhelming, especially in peak season.
And, my question to you, how many web chat messages do you get that are usually low priority?
Donald: Not many. And even if we do it, I'd rather have someone always checking every message.
Everybody here that uses text messaging, has their own way of using it.
One of my sales guys, he’s always sending links to customers, but then other guys don’t do that, they have their own way of talking to customers.
Some like lengthier messages, some don’t.
And that's totally fine because you send that message when you have the context of the relationship with that customer, right?
Brett: Yeah, we're trying to make it easier to manage for especially big teams because of user management, you can create specific user roles.
You’ll have people using a single user for service and another one for general stuff. And that allows them to have their own sub inboxes.
Donald: One of the things that we've tried to get away from is folks using their names in there.
Brett: Thank you! It doesn't matter who they're talking to, dude, they should have a great experience regardless!
Donald: There are so many times that there's a conversation that I'll start at the end of the day, but then it'll be tomorrow and then Steve will pick it up or Jeremiah or whomever will just kind of pick it up.
And they may not have any idea that they've just spoken to two different people.
Brett: Once a week I get requests to add signatures, and we keep saying it’s not an email, you don’t need a signature.
Donald: Yea, and it’s important for that customer to not to feel like they got passed from one person to another.
Brett: Yeah, and a big part of it is making it easier to manage a lot of different conversations without making it too much.
We can also bring in a little bit of automation, for example in peak season, if you get something from the website, that customer could get a response saying like, hey, thank you for sending us this message.
New Ikeono Features
🗂️ Inboxes
Inboxes are a new way to keep your team focused on the right tasks, you can use them the same way you have been using tags.
😁 Emoji Support
Easily access the emoji keyboard right in Ikeono.
🖌️ Redesigned Experience
A brand new user interface and experience, you can now search with phone number, easily connect integrations, and more.
We did receive it and we'll follow up shortly to try and prevent that phone call because they didn't get a response within 30 seconds.
Donald: Yeah, that would be good.
Brett: So with the new portal we decided to start from scratch and now we have full emoji support, how do you feel about emojis?
Donald: Love it.
