Many businesses have small cracks that could lead to larger problems later, like an improperly maintained vehicle leaking fluid. For the past 30+ years, consulting and technology firm DRIVE® has consulted and trained auto and truck repair shops across the U.S. and Canada to grow their companies and fill these cracks. They’re the development firm version of a car mechanic. DRIVE® helps auto shops grow, manage, and operate their business through long term planning and day-to-day operations.
The firm has expanded its own business service offerings as the auto repair industry has matured. Over the past few years, the DRIVE® team began to add marketing and advertising services. The success of these programs has allowed them to innovate and deliver a full agency marketing service program to their customers. These services include:
- Web design and development
- Social media management
- Digital Advertising
- Content Marketing
- Direct Mail
- And more…
DRIVE®’s marketing agency services deliver explosive results for their clients. Their customers consistently see an increase in phone calls, appointments, customers, sales, and revenue.
Challenge:
For Phillip Marzouk, DRIVE®’s Marketing Agency Director, one of the major problems he was facing was communicating those wins to clients. He was looking for a way to highlight that DRIVE® was directly responsible for the new business and increase in sales.
“We want to be able to track what works and what doesn’t on a shop-by-shop basis and determine our customers’ advertising needs to make the most out of their dollars.”
Ever since DRIVE® first started offering web development services, reporting and proving their ongoing value to their clients was a challenge.
“We would send automated reports out of Google Analytics and the customers didn’t understand it,” says Phillip.
His team calls customers once a month and reviews all the data together. Each month, they found themselves re-educating clients on what the various metrics meant and the context around them. It felt like the reports were creating unnecessary confusion and frustration. They were also taking up valuable time.
“We were looking for a system that would allow us to better report to our client base. We were looking for some automation levels in reporting. A tool that would allow us to give access to our client base to a live dashboard. And we wanted the control to show them the numbers that mattered.”
Manually collecting all of the reports and stitching them together would have required time that they didn’t have. An automated reporting system would solve this major dilemma.
Particularly, they needed the ability to customize their dashboard to focus on the numbers that really mattered. This would not only alleviate unnecessary stress for their clients, but it would also highlight the great job they were doing in marketing their business.
Solution:
The Cyfe dashboard was an ideal solution for Phillip’s reporting problems. It connected all of the different data sources that DRIVE® and their clients were already using.
“The most attractive feature of Cyfe was the sheer number of platforms that the dashboard could link up with easily. Most other tools required hours of manual work to pull in the right data accurately. It’s not sustainable or scalable. They couldn’t connect automatically. For a team with minimal developer resources, you can’t depend on connecting to APIs.”
Cyfe connects to everything, and for any custom data, the platform connects to Google Sheets or lets you upload spreadsheets so they can push the data they need.
“When you’re making 400+ dashboards, you simply make a few clicks and it is all connected. Spending minutes per dashboard instead of hours per dashboard. Otherwise, we’d still be building out our clients’ dashboard right now. “
How did Cyfe allow Phillip to give his clients access to their reporting in real-time?
“Clients have a link that they can bookmark in their browser and visit whenever they want. We’ve got some clients that never close their dashboard. Others will only check in once every three months. It’s at their pace.”
With a dashboard shared between account executives, advisors, and the clients, a communication gap was filled. Cyfe surfaced a solution to an unanticipated problem.
“We’re able to use it more efficiently within our organization. What makes us different from other advertising agencies is that we’re an extension of a business development firm. So one of the most important things was to be able to report these numbers to our own business advisors.”
When one of their business advisors touches base with a client, and says, “Hey you’re having a lot of problems bringing in cars. Let’s see what’s going on with your marketing.” They don’t need to take a few days to pull together a marketing report. They can just click on the same link that the client has and see a live update of what’s happening with their marketing.
“When you’re managing 400 plus clients, seconds start to matter. So having that reporting dashboard with a live view, numbers we can curate, and data that we can accurately represent what’s going on was really important to us.”
Results:
So how did Cyfe ultimately impact the business? The primary value centered around improved client communication and support.
- Client satisfaction improved substantially.
- Customer retention improved.
- Customer complaints went down.
- Money saved in customer service calls.
- 50% reduction in customer service calls.
- Customers increased average spend by 1.78 times.
- Customer LTV increased.
Customer Service and Reputation
The business’s concern about the quality and efficiency of communication has completely changed with Phillip’s investment in reporting. Improving client communication was the result of better access to data. Poor reporting resulted in customers not knowing what they were getting for the money they were spending.
“The number of overall service calls due to a lack of communication has gone down exponentially.”
Cyfe allowed them to connect their website, Google My Business, and Ads into one dashboard to show website calls and calls from Google My Business. The dashboard tied the value to the marketing services.
Before Cyfe, Customers didn’t understand that the high ranking on Google translated to more traffic, phone calls, customers, sales, and ultimately more dollars in their pocket.
Being able to connect the website performance metrics and Google My Business actions into one dashboard clarified to clients what DRIVE® was doing to boost client business.
“Now we don’t have customers not understanding the service or concerned about communication because, at any point in time, they can click on their dashboard link and see live:
‘I’ve got this many calls out of my website. This many calls out of Google My Business. I know where the numbers are coming from. I know what’s happening. Now there’s value to what’s going on.’”
A clear understanding of the marketing performance led to a 50% reduction in customer service calls for DRIVE®. The reduction in calls saved a significant amount of money for the team.
“The very first thing we noticed was that client satisfaction improved substantially. The second thing that we noticed a few weeks down the line was customer retention increased.”
Business Value For Clients and DRIVE® Shops
Now that clients understand the value, they can give Phillip’s team the credit.
“Now clients are saying, ‘You’re responsible for me getting hundreds and hundreds of phone calls in just the last month. I can’t get rid of you.’”
In the context of the pandemic, Phillip and his team were able to show clients that their phone calls and business had increased. The reporting dashboard made a more compelling argument that the clients could invest more in marketing and advertising.
When they made the suggestion to add sanitization services at their client’s businesses
services at their clients’ dealerships, they were able to show in their reporting that the new service resulted in huge spikes of phone calls and sales.
“Clients would be able to attribute where things were coming from. Something that they could never do before. We could do that now with Cyfe dashboarding.”
Cyfe also allowed DRIVE ® to propose increases in advertising spend because they could visualize and attribute the phone calls to the ad spend.
One client had to add a 4th phone line because they were investing more in their advertising and it visibly drove more phone calls and more business. All of these tactics and reporting increased the lifetime value of their clients.
Conclusion
For Phillip and his team at DRIVE®, choosing Cyfe impacted their business operations dramatically. Set up was simple, saving them time in getting their clients’ live access to their performance. It improved customer satisfaction and reduced service calls, improving communication. It clarified and highlighted their value, earning them credit for their spending. It helped them help their clients more effectively.
What was the biggest value of adding Cyfe as your reporting tool of choice?
“The biggest thing that we saw was customers increasing their average spend. One customer became worth more dollars simply from having a dashboarding tool that allowed them to access it at any time and attribute what is working and where their money is going.”
