Founded in 1926, UAP is Canada's leading distributor and merchandiser of automotive parts and replacement accessories for cars and heavy vehicles. As part of its automotive parts division, NAPA Auto Parts has close to 600 stores in Canada offering expert advice, more than 500,000 replacement parts for cars of all ages, and tools and equipment for service and repair centers, professional mechanics, do-it-yourselfers, and automobile owners. NAPA is the most recognized brand associated with automotive parts in North America. The brand is also synonymous with trust, professionalism, and tradition.
Taylor Shonwise is the Owner of two NAPA stores in Ontario, Canada — Lively Auto Supply and Bardon Automotive. As the owner, Taylor's goal is to maximize return on investments. That means getting the most out of not only his inventory but also his employees. When it was announced that UAP was offering Prokeep as a solution to its stores as a means of simplifying and centralizing customer communication, Taylor was one of the first to take advantage. And soon after his trial started he started seeing benefits he hadn't anticipated that resulted in more upsell opportunities, hours saved in outreach daily, and a better flow of communication across stores internally.
Here's how Taylor broke it down.
An overlooked time spend for distributors is on the outbound order update communication. Calling customers to let them know their order has arrived can take one minute to five minutes. Mix in voicemails and phone-tag and multiply that by your daily order count, and your team is easily spending an hour a day on simple updates.
Prokeep's text messaging service allows you to reach your customers quickly and at their convenience. When you're copy-and-pasting scripted notification touch-points, your team reduces that hour a day to about five minutes (and that's without sending automated order updates through a Prokeep integration with your ERP).
Taylor's team took this time savings to the next level by incorporating add-on suggestions in their outbound scripts. When they let a customer know their order was ready, they'd ask if they wanted to add a frequently purchased item that would be ready when they arrived. The results... they said yes. That means an increased AOV after purchase.
"On a day-to-day basis in either of our stores we'll have 15 to 25 special order items for the retail side that we'll have one of my decent counter people calling all of these individuals and tying up an hour of his day. Now my counter people have that task done in about 5 minutes, done. That's an hour saved every day." - Taylor Shonwise, Owner.
Time and again, Prokeep users report that one of the biggest time savers and stress relievers that Prokeep provides is the ability for customers to text in pictures of parts, part lists, and VIN numbers. Pictures cut down time on trying to decipher what your customer is describing over the phone by simply being able to identify it yourself with your own eyes. Plus, it removes the chance of misinterpreting the part order and creating a bad customer experience when they come in and you don't have what they need on deck.
"A picture's worth a thousand words. You can alleviate a lot of stress from describing a part or an item to a customer... [they] can send us an image of a part and not necessarily need to know what the name is, and on our side we can identify it very quickly and get back to them... It's a big deal." - Taylor Shonwise, Owner
When it comes to team communication, a lot can be lost when you're switching between tabs to different programs or picking up the phone to call another store or an outside rep — making the phone line busy for customers trying to place an order.
With Prokeep, your team — from departments to cross-store interactions — can communicate in the same space they're managing customer conversations so that customer orders or inquiries are never hidden behind another tab and can always be prioritized and responded to quickly.
"It's nice to just send [the other store] a text and say, 'do you actually have XAB? Can you put your hands on it please?' It takes 20 seconds versus having a conversation with somebody and taking them off a task that they may be doing. And that's really the advantage of this system; you're able to send messages and interconnect with our team without taking them out of a task or losing their focus... I love it."
- Taylor Shonwise, Owner
When customers do business with you by texting your team's personal phones, your employee owns that relationship. This can lead to real problems. From a legal standpoint, the conversation records are private between your customer and your employee. From a business standpoint, if your employee leaves, your customer may go with them to their next place of employment since it's the same number they're texting.
Prokeep allows you to take ownership and control customer relationship records by centralizing all customer text message conversations in one database. Plus, it offers you full visibility into how customers are being talked to via text so you can ensure professionalism and consistency across your service channels.
"I like that it takes it away from individuals on their phones... It really is a win. When it's on an individual's personal phone, we can never legally ask to go through that person's messages. Well, this is my system, so I have the ability to look at it and see how you're communicating with my customers... if there is ever a he-said-she-said situation, we'd be able to see what happened in hard text." - Taylor Shonwise, Owner
Prokeep offers training and support from the jump. From team training to customer adoption and marketing playbooks, your team can start messaging customers from Prokeep on day one and become Prokeep champions in no time.
In less than 30 minutes, we were up and running. I mean, if you can send a text message on your personal phone, you can use Prokeep." - Taylor Shonwise, Owner