How a nationwide mobile car detailing service used Smart Clusters to boost appointments by 46% with existing workforce
Overview
A leading UK mobile car detailing company, has been serving clients nationwide for over 10 years with a team of 120 technicians. At the core of its operations is a custom-built CRM and scheduling system, managed by its in-house engineering team. While this system allowed clients to book appointments and pay online, as well as for dispatchers to schedule on their behalf, it had critical gaps, which led to inefficient technician scheduling and routing, and hundreds of thousands of pounds of lost revenue and appointments. Recognizing they lacked the technical expertise and capacity to rebuild and optimize the system, the company sought an external solution to address these challenges.
Challenge
Despite steady sales growth, the CEO and leadership team were increasingly concerned that ongoing operational inefficiencies and hiring challenges could lead to stagnation or even decline. Technicians were spending over 1 hour traveling between appointments, often getting stuck in heavy traffic leading to frustration, lowered job satisfaction and ultimately a high turnover rate.
The company's custom scheduling system allowed customers to book any available time slot without factoring in travel time or proximity to existing appointments. This led to excessive drive times and long gaps between jobs, wasting up to 3 hours of potential service in an 8-hour shift.
The in-house engineering team was stretched thin maintaining the company's custom built CRM, leaving little room for innovation. The system lacked crucial schedule and route optimization capabilities, making it difficult to keep up with business demands and growth, and hiring external developers to scale and enhance the system proved to be quite costly.
Solution
To tackle these challenges, the company selected MarketBox, specifically for its Smart Clusters API product, which directly integrates into their custom scheduling system. By passing through booking data and technician travel zones and schedules, and real time traffic to deliver calculations for optimized time suggestions, which are then sent back to the company's scheduling system.
Dispatchers can preview and book from these optimized time slots from their scheduling system for clients, while clients can choose to book directly. When dispatchers or clients book from these suggested times, technicians are able to cut down on travel time, lower carbon emissions and boost client-provider satisfaction.
By partnering with MarketBox, the team benefits from ongoing updates and refinements to the product suite, decreasing load on internal engineering resources.
Results
Average increase in daily appointments
Decrease in technician turnover
Reduction in technician drive time
Reduction in CO2 per driver per week
Conclusion
By integrating MarketBox and Smart Clusters, the company leveled up their own product offering and in the process found a means to help the environment, with greatly reduced travel times between bookings and vehicles no longer stuck in commuter traffic.