How Socar Malaysia gets service right during rapid growth

Socar Malaysia, a car-sharing startup, was established in 2018 by South Korea’s Socar. With its app, the company aims to create convenience for those in need of a car.

With nearly 2,000 cars in more than 1,000 locations in Malaysia, Socar has seen tremendous growth over the last few years. They set themselves apart from ride-hailing companies like Uber and Ola by allowing their customers to have complete autonomy in their vehicles for as long as they’ve reserved it.

"Our customers are a mix of young and old, but we're seeing that a majority of them are younger," said Rajan Manoharan, head of customer service at Socar Malaysia. The younger generation doesn't want to be saddled with the long-term cost of owning and maintaining a car, but they want to enjoy the perks of having a car on hand."

He sat down with our team to discuss how customer service evolves at a hypergrowth startup and how his organization has been dealing with the challenges brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The challenge

Socar Malaysia saw massive growth in a relatively short period of time, and Manoharan agreed that his team had to deal with some growing pains. 

One of the biggest challenges was the leap in traffic on their app and website. There were too many bookings, not enough cars, and not enough agents to support their customers. In addition to this, their internal helpdesk tool did not allow him to identify the roadblocks and issues surrounding their support, and the data was extremely fragmented. 

Manoharan began to evaluate tools that would help transform customer service at Socar and discovered Freshdesk. 

“Once we implemented Freshdesk, I started to identify and address the key issues surrounding our customer service," Manoharan said. "We set up a customer experience team whose main focus was looking at process efficiencies, namely, the gaps within the customer service teams, and other departments they coordinate with to resolve customer problems. We needed to address these gaps and build a more robust journey for our customers.”

Staying available for customers 24/7

When asked about Socar Malaysia’s customer philosophy, Manoharan honed in on one principle that drives all their customer interactions.

"We want to ensure that every time a customer reaches out in need of support, someone is there to help," Manoharan said.

This defining philosophy is a result of the time-sensitive nature of customers' queries. For example, they may be unable to unlock a car that they’ve reserved or have a problem with the engine of their ‘social', which won’t start. In such cases, being unable to get hold of a support agent would be disastrous. 

Aside from responsiveness, another key component of customer service at Socar is effective and efficient collaboration.

“We collaborate across teams from within the Freshdesk app itself in order to keep everyone in the loop and keep track of all communications," according to Manoharan. "When we’re dealing with a team or third party that does not have access, we send an outbound email through Freshdesk so the communication is still tracked.”

Adapting to troubling times

For a long time, Socar Malaysia only offered phone and email support to its customers. The idea of moving to chat support existed, but it was decided that Socar would take a staggered approach to adopting messaging channels. When the COVID-19 pandemic spread across the world, Manoharan and his team were forced to reinvent the wheel.

“Everyone was suddenly expected to work from home, and instead of keeping with our initial idea of staggering the introduction of chat, we just flipped the switch," he said. "Overnight, we switched off the phone and switched on chat, and fortunately, there was no backlash nor any complaints from our customers. In fact, people seemed quite happy with the change.”

With the introduction of Freshchat, Rajan saw an almost immediate increase in his team's efficiency. With chat and messaging capabilities, his agents were able to do more in the same amount of time.

Says Manoharan: “We were typically handling 35 calls per agent, but with chat, we’re able to increase that number to 95 chats per agent. That’s 3x productivity, and our reports show that we haven’t missed a single query since implementing Freshchat. Our efficiency is currently at 97%.”

Socar integrated Freshchat support within its app, allowing customers to contact its agents quicker than before.

“Our younger customers were especially vocal about their satisfaction with this change," according to Manoharan.

Today, most customers contact support via the in-app chat. WhatsApp has also become an essential support channel, providing a way for customers to reach out if the app malfunctions unexpectedly. While switching to chat impacted the business in a big way, it was just the first step in adapting to the new world order.

Reserving cars for long-term travel was no longer a priority for most people, and Socar had to come up with a new way to keep their business going.

Each time a car is delivered to a new customer, it is completely sanitized, giving the customer confidence in the car’s safety as well. In this age when public transport is no longer trusted, more and more people are willing to hire a service like Socar to travel without the risk of infection.

Growing with Freshworks

Socar Malaysia is still growing rapidly, and the company is looking to expand its operations to East Malaysia and Indonesia.

Says Manoharan: "We would like to have our team in Indonesia on Freshdesk as well. We need to be able to share knowledge and information across regions through our helpdesk.”