CraftJack lays the foundation for better customer communications with Twilio

Challenge

CraftJack needed a way to unify and act on customer data in real-time, without tapping into the company’s limited engineering resources.  

Solution

With Twilio Segment and Engage, CraftJack’s marketing and product teams can access and utilize user data themselves to create better, more personalized experiences for customers. 

Introduction

Operating under Angi Home Services, CraftJack helps homeowners find skilled, reliable contractors in their area, while providing quality leads to service providers. According to Mike Figueroa, a Sr. Product Manager at CraftJack,  “​​If someone wants to get work done on their house, they can trust CraftJack to find the right service professional for the job.”

Over the last few years, the company’s two-sided marketplace has grown considerably due in part to the Covid-19 pandemic. Alongside this growth, CraftJack has seen a significant jump in the amount of customer data points they collect and process from homeowner service requests and service professional signups.

However, the company’s current data practices could not effectively handle their needs at scale.  CraftJack also wanted to use customer data to personalize customer communications and marketing campaigns, but this required the company to use valuable technical engineering resources to build complex integrations with third-party vendors. 

“Being such a small team, we try to do more with less at CraftJack,” said Figueroa. “We try to use our developer resources to really focus on the core of our business — connecting homeowners with service professionals and providing the highest quality leads possible. For anything else, we want to use platforms, services, and partners that can do that for us.”

With limited developer resources, CraftJack needed a solution that could not only centralize its data, but also empower its marketing and product teams to self-serve and build campaigns without leaning too heavily on their engineering team. 

Unlocking a single view of customer data

As a longtime Twilio customer already using Voice to connect homeowners and service providers, Lookup to verify user account validity, and Studio to confirm the accuracy of homeowner’s phone numbers, CraftJack was immediately drawn to Twilio Segment’s customer data platform and Twilio Engage’s omnichannel customer engagement solution. Aside from the added bonus of staying within the Twilio ecosystem, Twilio Segment also allowed the CraftJack team to connect and consolidate all of their customer data points, integrate seamlessly with their third-party tools, and empower the company’s internal teams to self-serve. 

“With Segment Connections, even non-technical product folks like myself could easily integrate new tools in minutes, without needing to use our precious developer resources,” said Figueroa. “That was really just the icing on the cake for us.”

CraftJack was also able to simplify its tech stack by exchanging its existing third-party email and SMS providers for Twilio Engage. Using Twilio Engage, the team had confidence that the data fueling their campaign was reliable and up-to-date, sourced directly from Twilio Segment's top-notch customer data platform. The team could deliver personalized experiences through Twilio's native email and SMS channels while also seamlessly connecting Segment with CraftJack's existing channels and tech tools, thanks to Twilio's 400+ out-of-the-box integrations.

Activating customer data

With data unification squared away, now the CraftJack team was free to build personalized experiences across their many channels, including: 

• Push notifications to alert service providers when they receive a new lead.

• SMS to alert service professionals about new leads and homeowners to confirm their service requests, including information about the expected phone call.

• Phone calls to verify homeowner identities, qualify leads, and connect service providers with homeowners.

• Email to connect service providers and homeowners and re-engage audiences.

While these used to be very generic communications, the company can now use Segment to better cater these messages to recipients and deliver the right message at the right time. 

Driving sign-ups with personalized customer journeys

Since the pandemic, CraftJack has seen unprecedented increase in new user sign ups, as homeowners spending more time at home noticed improvement projects that couldn’t go ignored. But amid the increased demand, CraftJack had an internal bottleneck forming on the professional services side of the house. Initially, professional services users could only sign up for the platform by speaking with a salesperson. 

With a backlog of potential new users piling up, the company knew it needed a new way to streamline new user sign up and onboarding. Thanks to Twilio, the company was able to quickly build and launch a new self-service sign up flow, allowing service professionals to add their business to the site on their own. 

Now, Figueroa and his team have newfound visibility into every step of the signup process and, more importantly, where new users are dropping out of the funnel. This allows them to identify potential friction points and make impactful changes to the experience to ensure the highest number of new users sign up successfully. 

By tracking actions like “account created,” “account activated,” and “payment method added,” Figueroa and his team were able to see which users took these actions and which did not. Then, they could send follow up emails or SMS messages powered by Twilio Engage native channels. One such friction point was adding a payment method, which saw a large number of service providers dropping out of the funnel at this step. 

“The first journey that we set up in Twilio Engage is for when service providers sign up, but forget to add a credit card or set up their service area,” said Dietch. “We can send out communications to steer them back by reminding them to create a service area and provide payment methods so they can start receiving service requests.” 

Since introducing the account activation journey, CraftJack has seen a 31% increase in pro-new user signups year over year, helping the company scale and welcome even more high-quality service providers to the platform. In the future, the team hopes to leverage Twilio Engage to cater these messages even further based on a user’s unique skill-set (painters, handymen, plumbers, etc). 

Increasing reviews and driving business for service professional partners

Before Twilio, the CraftJack team felt stuck sending generic messages to their customers. In an industry where customers have to invite service providers into their home, generic messages may not always inspire consumer confidence and trust. 

Since implementing Segment, CraftJack can give homeowners more details than ever before about their services, like a day-of communication specifying who the service provider is sending and when they will arrive at their home. “If you have a home emergency, you want to make sure that you're connected with the best professionals who can do the work and inviting someone that you can trust into your home,” said Figueroa. “We've been using Segment’s customer data platform to deliver more personalized experiences to our customers to both show the quality of our services and inspire trust.”

But while CraftJack knew it had lots of happy customers, it struggled to collect reviews from homeowners after projects were completed. Boosting review rates was a top priority for the team at CraftJack because service providers with more in-platform reviews tend to retain customers better and generate more business on the platform. They tackled this as one of their initial use cases with Segment Journeys. 

Now when a project wraps up, the homeowner receives an email asking their level of satisfaction for the exact service they received and if they’re willing to leave a review of the contractor and their work. Service providers can even send reminder emails to past clients within the CraftJack platform to try to drive more reviews for their profile. Since launching this journey, the company has seen a 41% increase in homeowner reviews year over year. And, future customers can easily scan in-platform customer testimonials and choose the service provider they feel they can trust to do the best job possible.

Looking to the future: Incorporating Twilio’s CustomerAI technology

While CraftJack has already found success unifying and activating its customer data, they feel they’ve only scratched the surface of what Segment can help them achieve. “We've really just hit the tip of the iceberg with Twilio Engage. We have so many ideas of how we want to use the tool, we just haven't had the time to physically build them all out just yet,” said Figueroa.  

For starters, the CraftJack team plans to use Segment on the homeowner side of their business as well. This will help them create more personalized communications and campaigns for all of their customers, not just service providers. 

They are also hoping to leverage Twilio’s CustomerAI technology to scale their support team. “In the future, CraftJack would like to use something like CustomerAI for helping to scale up our account management support team,” said Figueroa. “Because we have such a small account management team, we will be able to support many, many more customers by using this tool.” 

With CustomerAI technology, CraftJack’s support agents can generate a brief summary of a customer’s history. They can also craft customized AI-generated responses during customer interactions informed by a user’s Segment profile and a large language model trained on the company’s knowledge base.

Whatever the future may hold for CraftJack, they know that Twilio can evolve with their business needs and continue to help them serve personalized experiences at scale for their customers. “We have plenty more ideas we’d implement in the future, and it’s all just much easier to do through Engage,” said Dietch. “Whatever your marketing team dreams up or hopes to do, you are able to accomplish in Twilio Engage.”