Zoomcar improves customer retention with personal, in-app support

 

Having previously relied on phone calls and emails, ZAP by Zoomcar now employs Freshchat as its primary channel to provide stellar in-app support. Backed by a 13-agent team, they ace 400 chats a day bringing down average first response time by 98.33%.

 

Owning a car is a huge commitment, one that can take up effort and resources. Zoomcar is an online platform that allows users to discover and book for self-drive rental cars. Zoomcar’s ZAP Subscribe program enables individuals to drive new or existing cars at a fixed monthly fee with benefits such as zero down payment, free insurance and car servicing. In addition to this, ZAP subscribers can share their car when idle, earning revenue and saving on their monthly subscription fee.

“Our primary objective of ZAP Subscribe is to leverage technology and data science to reduce all elements of friction for the subscriber,” says Greg Moran, CEO & Co-founder, Zoomcar. To do this, Zoomcar introduced the ZAP app where its customers can lock and unlock a car key-less, and provides an efficient interface to list your car, track bookings and revenue. An important step that Zoomcar implemented to reduce friction is using Freshchat to offer in-app chat support.

 

 

To understand the impact of Freshchat, we spoke to Puja Anand, product manager at ZAP. Puja owns the subscriber experience at ZAP for the entire customer lifecycle - right from the time of car delivery to termination.

One of the main challenges that ZAP faced with regards to customer experience is that they were unable to monitor the quality of support they offered to their customers. Currently, there are 2500+ customers who are using the ZAP Subscribe program. Initially, ZAP provided support through phone calls and it became an arduous task to monitor IVR quality. With Freshchat’s conversation filters and inbox view, the supervisor’s job was made much easier. 

Customers also faced difficulty in getting in touch with ZAP’s support team. “There is a peak in call traffic when we generate invoices and customers have to face long wait times. During this time, the first response time is typically about 8 - 10 minutes.” says Puja. This can get extremely frustrating for customers. Agents spend at least 15 minutes with every customer on the phone leading to decreased efficiency and increased workload. Puja says “With Freshchat, our agents can handle 2 - 3 customers at the same time and we have reduced our first response time to 2 minutes, and it is under 1 minute for 90% of our chats.”
 

Go-to-market in two days

To provide in-app support, ZAP integrated Freshchat’s mobile SDK on their iOS and Android app. “We were also surprised on how easily we were able to implement Freshchat, we didn’t need any tech intervention. Our entire live chat operation was up and running in just two days and we were able to go to market quickly!”

 

 

Freshdesk - Freshchat integration FTW!

ZAP uses Freshdesk, Freshworks’ helpdesk software to manage emails as tickets. They tied their ticketing and messaging workflow together by natively integrating Freshdesk with Freshchat.

Their support team face questions related to car booking, listings, payment, policy related queries and they also raise/report issues in the app. By integrating, ZAP pushes 30% of chats to tickets handling questions that need to be looked at more deeply and resolving those inside Freshdesk.

Freshdesk also enables ZAP to capture the categories of issues that are brought up (pricing, policies, listings), this helps in analysing the issue type and the efficiency of the support channel i.e, chat and email, within one dashboard.

 

More convenient, Much faster, Better availability

ZAP uses Freshchat’s in-app campaigns feature to make announcements about product updates as well as for gathering feedback. “After we launched Freshchat, we ran a product survey through in-app campaigns to get feedback on live chat adoption among our customers. In-app campaigns prove to be very powerful in engaging with different segments of our customers.” explained Puja.

 

 

The survey echoes positive sentiments from ZAP customers adopting and using Freshchat. 74% of ZAP customers use Freshchat as its a more convenient channel to report issues and consider a faster way to get answers. “This provides a frictionless way for ZAP to keep their customers’ happy improving our subscriber retention rate”, as Puja puts it.

Additionally, customers are also notified through email and push notifications, so they don’t have to be bound by a ‘session’. They are free to pick up conversations at their own convenience.

Puja is also a big advocate of Freshchat’s Canned Response for agents and teams. With Canned Responses, her team sets predefined replies to common queries, which can be accessed and sent by team members in between conversations, optimizing response time and boosting productivity and agent efficiency by 20%.

 

Future plans

ZAP by Zoomcar is keen to take Freshchat to the top of their customer funnel after seeing success with providing support to their existing subscribers.

Puja explained, “We are extending to the sales side as well, When people come to our website and look to subscribe to our Zoomcar, we definitely want to improve that experience as well. We’re in the process of adding Freshchat to our website which currently has over 450K monthly organic visits.”