The Challenge

 

Tire Outlet is building its tenth store in Northeast Florida, but it’s still a local business at heart. Although the tire shop competes with massive, nationwide chains, it maintains the personal touch its customers love.

 

While popularity was never an issue for Tire Outlet, modernizing communication was. The business started using customer interaction platforms to talk with customers but found them to be inefficient. “Zendesk is kind of hard to manage,” says Jenn Nicole, marketing coordinator at Tire Outlet. “Let’s say someone goes on chat for five seconds and doesn’t get an immediate response. They immediately leave your site and you lose the customer instantly.”

 

To patch this hole in their communication strategy, Tire Outlet looked to Podium for an easier way to interact with customers online.

 

The Solution

 

Podium quickly proved a convenient option for Tire Outlet. “The rollout was fairly simple,” says Nicole. “The platform kind of speaks for itself. There’s not too much training that you really need to go through in order to understand it.”

 

After taking Podium for a spin, Tire Outlet saw its impact on customer engagement. “It’s a platform where we’re able to communicate with our customers without having to go to multiple platforms. We used to have Zendesk, and we had our call center guys going from Zendesk to Facebook Messenger to the reviews. Now that it’s just all on one system, it makes it a lot easier to manage and make sure that nothing gets forgotten.”

 

With Podium, Tire Outlet can ensure it responds to any customer who reaches out.

 

The Result

 

Tire Outlet has seen an immediate impact since adding Podium’s Messaging Platform. “The amount of quotes that we send out per day through that messaging app has doubled, almost tripled since we’ve put it on,” says Nicole.

 

But beyond using the Messaging Platform to provide quotes, Tire Outlet also uses it to send potential customers product information to drive sales. “We’re able to send photos,” Nicole says. “It just has a lot more communication you’re able to do.”

 

Today, Tire Outlet can easily interact with customers and provide them with the personal, local service they’ve come to trust.