75 years of excellence and innovation—How Schomp Automotive Group stays ahead of the curve with Twilio

When Schomp Automotive Group, one of the largest and longest-standing independently owned automobile businesses in the Rocky Mountain region, experienced a sudden and total outage of their telephony system due to a cut line, the need for a better, scalable solution was immediate—and dire.

As a sales, service, parts, and collision center for thousands across Colorado and Utah, a loss of all telephone services made it virtually impossible for the company to deliver on its “One price. One person. One hour.” car sales promise. They turned to Twilio to implement a brand new SIP trunking configuration, and were up and running again in less than a day—a week before their old provider was able to restore service.

Since, the company has built a custom engagement solution using a suite of other products from the Twilio platform, to deliver exceptional customer service and enable a more engaging, positive automotive experience for all their customers.

A new phone system in a day

Smooth, efficient, and pleasant—not all (or even most) automotive groups can claim to provide a customer experience, whether it’s in service, parts, or sales, that hits all three of those notes. But for Schomp, it’s the standard they hold themselves to when it comes to how they communicate with their customers, no matter the channel or interaction.

Since the organization is constantly seeking new ways to improve the customer experience, the team was already discussing porting its telephony system to the cloud when a cut line forced their hand, explained Luke Nield, IT Director for the Schomp Automotive Group, and CJ DeBoer, Senior Communications Technician.

“We were back up and live with a brand new phone system, in 24 hours, on the backbone of Twilio,” Nield said. “That’s when we became a true believer in Twilio itself, from the help and the engagement that we had from the porting team, to the support team, to the sales team, all of them making sure that Schomp was taken care of and we could operate our business without any outage. And for our customers, they had no idea what we were doing in the background.”

DeBoer agreed.

“I’ve done a lot of ports in my years in the phone business; phone and IT and typically ports take a minimum of 10 days,” he said. “With Twilio, we got the port done in two hours. It was pretty impressive in all respects to get that done and to get it done right.”

Since switching to Twilio for telephony, the organization saves approximately $4,000 per month on phone services, and also was able to increase its call volume handling by 50 percent.

Now, the organization uses a host of Twilio products and APIs to provide a customer experience that consistently exceeds expectations. Thanks to Twilio, DeBoer said, the team was able to add and continually update custom messages and greetings to its telephony system to better route calls and requests. One common communications flow on the service side of the house starts with an appointment, scheduled via the Schomp website. The customer receives a Twilio Programmable Messaging-powered text message to confirm their appointment.

Then, throughout the service process, the Schomp team is able to keep their customer updated on how the service is going via text, and if a customer needs to call, they’re automatically routed to the exact department they need—rather than having to navigate a phone tree or answer clarifying questions—thanks to the organization’s smart telephony system.

The organization gets an immediate transcription of any customer call, for analysis and better understanding of how to make the entire process better. Then, when the service is complete, customers receive a link via text to pay right from their mobile device. Non-urgent, ongoing communications are often done via email with Twilio SendGrid.

Because of coronavirus-required social distancing, the organization has also had to rethink its existing sales communications. Twilio enabled the team to rapidly update their custom messages to explain new protocols related to COVID-19, and have empowered sales representatives to move the entire car sales process online, selling cars from the safety of their own homes.

“People can actually select a vehicle online and then go through the entire sales process via phone and text,” Nield said. “Sales people can take inbound calls, send messages, and do it all from home, and then we’re delivering cars right to people’s homes.”

For Nield, Twilio is a key part of ensuring Schomp is able to remain an innovator and disruptor in the automotive space, as they have been for more than 75 years.

“We’re always trying to get ahead of the curve,” he said. “When Twilio comes out with something new, we’re often the first ones to jump in to learn what we can do with it, what might be the next big thing.”

“Whatever we want to dream up, we can build it with Twilio,” DeBoer added.