Scoop: When Timing is Critical, SMS is the Best Option for Customer Support

We spoke with Adam Faludi, Dir of Customer Engagement at Scoop, about how they’ve created a new way for people to set up carpools and how support over SMS is essential to their success. Scoop is one of many Infobip customers using our Zendesk SMS plugin, and the Scoop story is unique because of the benefits of their service and how SMS made it possible.

Adam Faludi, Dir of Customer Engagement

Scoop is a fully automated, trip-by-trip carpooling solution for co-workers and neighbors. They work with companies across the San Francisco Bay Area (e.g. Salesforce, Gap Inc, Airbnb, Cisco, Workday, Clorox etc.) to make commuting easier and cheaper for their employees traveling from home to work, and back again.

Adam and the Scoop team are striving to bring percentages of single occupancy cars down across America and are passionate about upgrading the commute for everyone. Scoop is currently available in five markets: SF, San Jose, Pleasanton, Sunnyvale, and Palo Alto. Scoop partners with employers to offer this as an alternative commute option for their employees.

Delivering a successful commuter experience is a must. The team knew that the mobile app had to provide a communication option to engage with Scoop’s community. 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.

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.

Text messages have to be short, so the Scoop team has learned how to streamline answers with expanded FAQs and answers to common questions as part of the process.

Scoop community members can start an SMS to support right from the app, but if the agent needs to call, it’s just another tap away in Zendesk.

Why SMS in the first place? Email is everywhere. People rely on it far too often for critical information. The challenge with email is it’s far too easy for the emails to be lost, bounce, go to spam, or just missed in overloaded inboxes. 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. Email doesn’t even come close.

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.

With an Infobip account, Zendesk, and the Infobip plugin for Zendesk you can start sending and receiving SMS support tickets the same day. Give your customers the flexibility, convenience, and choice to contact you how they wish while still keeping everything in Zendesk as a trackable, actionable ticket.

Find out more about how it works email us at [email protected].