How Specialized Scaled To 90+ Bike Shops With Ikeono - Part 1
Image NOT from Shutterstock, we actually went there 😏
Since the beginning of 2020, Ikeono and Specialized have been working hand in hand as Specialized grew its retail presence. With over 90+ locations around the United-States, Specialized has seen massive growth in customer loyalty and has been able to put the customer experience at the fore-font of everything they do. Ikeono powers the text message threads that have played a key role in building strong, meaningful relationships with each community they serve.
For this interview, we wanted to speak to the people on the ground, understand the nitty-gritty of their day to day, and how text messaging fits in the picture.
On a cool and cloudy day in Austin, the Ikeono team had the opportunity to chat with the team at Specialized Austin and discover how Kimmi Ward (General Manager) and Rachael Cook (Market Manager) have been able to build such a strong community of riders that trust them.
Specialized has 3 types of physical presence: retail shops, experience centers where you can see and test out the latest and greatest models, and hives where you can come by to talk shop, a repair, or pick up your online order.
The Austin location we visited was a hive, luckily on this day the whole team was present, so we had a nice chat about text messaging and community building over some breakfast tacos as the Ikeono ding kept going off.
Q: How do you make business text messaging feel personal?
Kimmi Ward (General Manager, Specialized Austin): We make sure that the customer knows when it’s automated, I wouldn't want to send campaigns that sound really personal and then it's got the opt out option, because then it's disjointed for people.
Brett Lang (Co-founder, Ikeono): You know, it's the beauty of text messages, and the industry is changing dramatically.
We've been doing this for five years now just seeing how rapidly it's changed, we have put an effort to protect the human aspect. We've always tried to be good stewards of the system, which is why we've never introduced mass texting.
There was a point where nobody was following consent laws, and now there's all these new regulations that we have to deal with. But one of the benefits of all of these pain points currently is that it protects the ecosystem and you're right, it's about keeping this delicate balance.
Texting is so personal, right?
It's what we do with our friends. It's what we do with our family, our loved ones and now to be doing it with the business and it's why we have focused so specifically on the bike industry because of our experience, but also because bike shops have a connection with our customers unlike any other vertical I've ever dealt with.
And you're right, like you will be texting back and forth over questions about tire choices for the ride this coming weekend, and then get those kind of automation, it doesn’t feel right.
Kimmi: So I told Rachael as long as the language that we're using in the automation clearly calls out that it’s a little bot, I am okay with it, because there's only five of us in the shop and we want to communicate with our customers.
That kind of thing, just like make it really fun and acknowledge what it is because my big pet peeve is when companies send me a text message, and it sounds really personal and I get all excited for a second, I'm like, oh that's sweet, then I'm like, oh no, it's just a bot.
Rachael Cook (Market Manager): We could come up with a little dog robot avatar and then type text messages saying our dog bot is inviting you to the ride and then we can put the dog on our staff page on our website, something like that would be super fun.
As you can see, Chief 🐶 gets on the counter and the other day he sent a text message to a customer because he was standing on the computer and it was just this long diatribe of letters and we were like: OMG! We're so sorry, the dog got on the computer 😅 and we texted him a photo of Chief 🐶.
So many people say: I love that I can just text you guys, it gives everybody more control over how they interact with us, because if somebody is in a meeting, they can just quickly text us and say: I want an Aethos! And then back to their meeting when it's convenient timing for them and then it's convenient timing for us too, which is nice.
So we get to be way more efficient because we just have more control, more levers to pull off how we move through our day, we just send them over links, we use the templates, and there's so many components to it that I just can't imagine living without it.
Q: Did any of you work at shops that didn’t use Ikeono?
Rachael: Yea, Kimmi and I have been in the industry before working here.
At the last place I worked at, during Covid, we pivoted to a curbside model and we integrated with ZipWhip.
We iterated a handful of times with that platform, we were integrating a new CRM and drip marketing campaign at the same time, but we were spending a lot of time and resources on that campaign and making sure that we were sending the right message to the right person at the right time, and at that point that we had about 70,000 customer records in our database.
People would shop at different locations and someone would misspell their name or their spouse would come in and buy something under their account or they were shopping for someone else or whatever the case may be.
So we had to hire a company that cross referenced our customer records with the credit bureau and validated addresses and email addresses and names and all the things to make sure that we weren't sending an irrelevant message to a rider.
So with Zipwhip, it was predominantly just to facilitate the sales process through the curbside operating model situation.
Brett: Were they using Lightspeed at the time?
Kimmi: No, we used CounterPoint.
Brett: Was there any notion of integration between the point of sale and the texting platform?
Kimmi: No, we just had multiple browsers set up.
But that would be nice if somebody texted in and then all of a sudden they were saved in Lightspeed as a customer.
Brett: Yea, we actually have a new portal coming out soon that will give you more control over that behavior.
So, and then as far as NPS that's getting a complete revamp as well and we're going to integrate that deeper into the system and try to show more things.
It might not be necessary in a tight knit group like you have here, but some of the bigger locations where they have a lot of potential turnover with employees and stuff. We're starting to associate employees with NPS transactions.
The other thing that's cool is that we made a change a couple of weeks ago to the surveys where when a customer enters a 9 or 10 on the survey and they hit submit it automatically prompts them for a Google review, and takes them directly to Google.
*discussion about how good the green sauce is 😅🌮*
Rachael: Yea, we have seen a huge uptick in Google Reviews based off of that.
Brett: BikeSource Highlands Ranch, they got like 11 reviews within one week when we made that simple change.
Kimmi: And that’s HUGE! Recently the Domain Northside store has had multiple riders come in and some of them traveled a fair distance to visit the store and they came in and said it's because of the Google reviews.
Jackie: Yea it’s been awesome! They came in and told us, we specifically came here because of your Google reviews *shouting from the back*.
Brett: Yea, we all got burned out on Yelp, right? And now, Google is kind of positioning themselves to be this beacon truth.
And that's the nice thing about the net promoter scores being able to check in with the customer, especially for the bike industry since it’s just so susceptible to these perception issues.
We see it all the time, a customer brings in an old bike, you do a tune up and they drop the chain on the first ride and we know it's a simple fix, but they perceive it as we just did a poor job and so trying to get those customers and re-engage them with is key
There was one that popped up in the Los Catos location a couple of days ago, the customer gave feedback and they were super responsive to that customer.
And the customer responded: You know, the fact that you even replied to this message tells me a lot and it makes me really appreciate you as a business.
Rachael: Yea we had one of those last week.
Brett: So it's one of those things where everybody's vying for those reviews nowadays, everybody is trying to get the attention of the customer by any means necessary. And in all honesty, a product is a product, right?
You could order one of these online delivered to your house if you want to, but the customers come here for the experience, the educational information, so it's really cool to kind of see that play out in real life.
Q: Do you remember a time when you had to call every customer or email every customer?
Kimmi: At the old place we worked at.
Brett: And why was it the worst thing ever?
Kimmi: It takes forever, and they don't answer, and their voice mailbox is full and then they yell at you because they never heard back from you.
I don't know who said it, but somebody said, calling somebody is like the new showing up at somebody's door unannounced.
Like when somebody just calls me, I'm like, *gasps* .. why are you calling me? Send me a text, like, who died?
And you never know when it's a proper time to talk to somebody and it's just always awkward.
I mean we send somebody a text message just to prepare for a call, like you can call us now, we're ready for you And it's so much more comfortable for that person to be like, great.
Brett: Yea, and they're going to be able to get through immediately, right? It's not going to be 10 minutes on hold, it's not going to be a voicemail.
Kimmi: Yea, and they don't have to explain their entire situation to you in the first 90 seconds of the phone call just to get what they need done.
It's like the context is already there in the text thread and that's one thing that makes our operation wildly more efficient than the record keeping we did at the old place.
For example, we would have 35 people on staff at the store on a Saturday and somebody come in and be like, oh yeah, I talked with somebody the other day and then great, we have to do this all over again vs with the text thread, you can just scan it and be like, yeah, I know exactly where that rider is in their journey and what they need and get it done.
Have you changed any processes purely because of text messaging?
Brett: Like was there something that you started with? It just wasn't working and you went to texting instead?
Kimmi: We've started with texting and just always worked. So why change it? If anything, we received a lot of phone calls in the early days.
We are releasing our interview in multiple parts 👀 our key takeaways so far have been:
#1 Meeting your customers where they are is more important than ever – customers do want the convenience of texting you during a meeting and making a sneaky purchase.
#2 Texting is for relationship building – strategizing and being aware of how your tone lands with customers can make all the difference.
#3 Phone calls are extremely personal, and relationship building with your customers is possible but you just might not be using the most important communication channel.
Watch out for our next post on how a text thread helped solve a sticky situation, and how different generations react to text to pay!
