End Results
Seamlessly grew business by 43%
Cherished by today’s busy consumers, the meal kit delivery industry is predicted to pull in $10 billion of revenue by 2020. But, as more and more of these companies jump into the market, the competition is growing fiercer. In order to succeed, businesses must be operationally efficient while maintaining quality to achieve high levels of customer satisfaction.
Scratch Culinary is a meal delivery company in Arizona that offers clean foods for busy and health-conscious customers. Their meals, which are pre-cooked, can accommodate many strict diets, like Macros, Paleo and Keto, and are delivered twice a week. Customers simply have to heat them up to enjoy.
When Scratch Culinary increased the number of weekly meals sold by 900%, Shannon Johnson, Director of Operations, realized that a few key aspects of their operations had to change. First, their delivery communications needed to be managed more efficiently. Secondly, the business needed a new way to quickly contact its customers.
After reviewing multiple options for business text messaging platforms, Johnson found a cost-effective, feature-full platform—Heymarket.
The Need to Streamline Customer Communications
Scratch Culinary doesn’t ship their meals; they directly deliver them in packages to consumers via 40 different routes. Although the meals are transported in coolers with dry ice the meals are not delivered in coolers which means that drivers have to ensure that customers are home to receive their meals. When customers aren’t at the door to accept their delivery, drivers text or call them to see where they might be. 
While this method ensures that meals are handled safely, Johnson was concerned that drivers had to use their personal phones to contact customers. Because the drivers are independent contractors and not part of a larger delivery company, they couldn’t use the internal, corporate communication system. This led to a few problems:
- Customers often contacted the drivers when they really needed to contact Scratch Culinary’s customer service, leading to confusion and unanswered queries
- Drivers were sometimes contacted after-hours, resulting in a disjointed contractor and customer experience
- Driver and customer conversations couldn’t be reviewed for performance since SMS was located on personal devices
While Johnson was primarily concerned with managing driver communications, she also wanted to find a way to quickly reach out to customers. To inform customers about key changes in schedule, like holidays or emergencies, or safety-related information, Johnson used emails sent through Mailchimp. However, these messages often ended up in spam folders or had a low open rate.
Johnson decided to tackle these challenges head-on. Because she knew that texting worked well for drivers in real-time situations, she decided to look for an enterprise-level business texting platform for help.
How Business Text Messaging Improves Customer Communications
Johnson was able to set up Heymarket in an hour. The Scratch Culinary team tried a variety of Heymarket features, quickly finding their favorites:
Shared Inbox. All incoming messages, whether they’re sent to drivers or customer service teams, can be seen in a shared inbox. The shared inbox has multiple benefits; non-delivery questions can be answered by the working Scratch Culinary administrative team, and administrators can easily review driver-to-customer messages for performance or compliance purposes.
Automated Messages. After-hours replies allow the Scratch Culinary team to let customers know they care—while ensuring that employees can recharge during their time off. After-hours replies are set to reflect the team’s working hours, and as soon as they arrive at work, they can quickly reply to the messages waiting in their inbox.
Lists. With the help of lists, administrators can quickly send out messages to select customers, whether they are emergency notifications or otherwise. The Heymarket platform uses merge tokens to draw on customers’ custom fields and personalize each message automatically.
The Business Impact of Business Text Messaging
After using Heymarket’s business texting platform, the Scratch Culinary team immediately noticed results—and as the company rapidly grew, they noticed that Heymarket allowed them to scale with ease.
Secured driver privacy. Because drivers can text customers through their Heymarket app, their private numbers are protected. If customers choose to write them after hours, the messages go straight to the app and not to their personal phone. This reduces Scratch Culinary’s liability in the case of a mishandled private number.
Improved customer service. Sometimes, customers ask drivers to leave deliveries outside, even when a customer isn’t home. Due to food safety reasons, this is not allowed. But now, drivers can quickly ask a team member to join the conversation, allowing Scratch Culinary’s moderators to step in and let customers know their options. Customer service agents can also identify service-related questions sent to drivers, and use their expertise to answer them. For administrative announcements, like emergency notifications or holiday reminders, agents can quickly send personalized mass messages to team members, too.
Increased transparency. Finally, the Scratch Culinary team has full transparency into all customer conversations. Their team can ensure drivers are interacting with customers as they should be, reviewing conversations for accuracy and professionalism. Then, team members can provide drivers with further training—or praise—if needed.
Streamlined operations. Scratch Culinary’s Heymarket inbox receives messages from native texting apps, web chat buttons, Instagram, and Facebook. Because the Scratch Culinary team now sees all customer communications within a single shared inbox, they can easily manage and organize all of their customer communications.
Heymarket has made it easy for our business to scale, and scale quickly. —Shannon Johnson, Director of Operations at Scratch Culinary
Because customers could more easily reach Scratch Culinary’s customer service team, and because of the operation team’s increased transparency, Scratch Culinary found it easy to scale.
With help from business text messaging, we increased the number of weekly meals sold by 43% in six months. —Shannon Johnson, Director of Operations at Scratch Culinary
How Business SMS Fits in with Scratch Culinary’s Future
Scratch Culinary has a lot of projects planned for the future. They expect to expand to other states and even start a restaurant for to-go orders. With the help of Heymarket, they expect to find it easy to scale.
As Scratch Culinary discovered, business texting services help streamline operations so that businesses can scale with ease.
- Business text messaging helps improve customer service by offering a team-centric shared inbox that encourages collaboration.
- Business text messaging helps increase transparency with its all-access shared inbox, which can be regulated via permissions and role settings.
- Business text messaging helps centralize communications via its integrations with other messaging channels.
Want to learn more about business text messaging for dispatch and operations? Give us a shout.
