Scoop: Two-way SMS empowering customer support

Challenge

The Scoop team is striving to bring percentages of single occupancy cars down across America and are passionate about upgrading the commute for everyone. The Scoop team knew that their mobile app had to provide a communication option to engage with Scoop’s community. Text messages have to be short, so the Scoop team had to learn how to streamline answers with expanded FAQs and answers to common questions as part of the commuter engagement process.

Solution

Scoop uses Infobip’s Zendesk plugin to integrate inbound and outbound SMS right into their Zendesk workflow. SMS messages work like any other support ticket, with the only exception that SMS messages have to be shorter than emails.

Scooper trip recommendations:

To make carpooling much more efficient, Scoop recommends trips based on time and location of their riders and drivers. The support team can send automated messages to their community members with suggested carpool options. Because the Infobip SMS plugin for Zendesk enables 2-Way SMS, Scoop can start these conversations with customers directly.

Benefits of SMS support

SMS messages are read over 90% of the time (and Infobip’s platform can tell you if the messages aren’t delivered). SMS is faster than email with very low latency (Did you get my email? Now? How about now? Wait let me resend it…). For coordinating carpools time is essential. You can’t have messages come a few minutes late or people could miss rides, or drivers waiting for a person who needs to cancel a ride at the last minute. You can’t match SMS when it comes to delivery, speed or reliability.

Result

Scoop found that as soon as people could use SMS for support…they did…in droves. This presented an interesting situation. SMS-based support tickets could be handled much faster than email or phone — SMS support requests get right to the problem without embellishment — but there were so many more messages from the community that the support team found ways to streamline their processes to be more efficient and take advantage of the wealth of feedback from their users. In truth, this is a high quality problem. Engaged customers giving feedback and helping make the service better creates a two-way personal conversation for Scoop enhancing its community-centric culture.