With more than 500 local technicians in 11 countries, iCracked is the world’s largest and most efficient on-demand repair and buyback service for Apple iPhones, iPads, and iPods. Built on fast, professional service, iCracked makes it easy for customers to repair or sell their iOS devices by dispatching a certified “iTech” in real-time to a convenient location of the customer’s choosing.
Breaking an iPhone is easy; fixing it is hard: mail-in repairs take days, and repair shops (if there’s even one nearby) can’t always be trusted. People have important information on their mobile phones, which they access on a daily basis, and they don’t want to be without it. Founded to make iOS device repairs quick, convenient and reliable, iCracked ensures that consumers aren’t left stranded when their iPhone, iPad, or iPod malfunctions.
Initially, iCracked listed hundreds of iTechs’ personal phone numbers on its website, which was highly inefficient and frustrating for customers who had to cold call down the list to find an available technician. iCracked then turned to a virtual phone system offering, which lacked the APIs for building advanced automation capabilities. In addition, without call tracking and recording, it was difficult to monitor customer interactions and virtually impossible to guarantee service. The communications platform in place also failed to scale with iCracked, resulting in poor call quality and dropped calls.
iCracked needed a powerful and flexible communications platform that would enable the company to easily integrate advanced communications features into its business processes.
iCracked relies on Twilio SMS and Twilio Voice to automate work scheduling, measure technician productivity, support real-time customer communication, and deliver superior customer service.
Status updates and work scheduling
iCracked sends status updates and enables work scheduling using Twilio SMS for two-way alerts and notifications. Once the customer has entered his information, including device type, repair issue, and location, into iCracked’s mobile app or website, the customer is updated via SMS that the order request was received and an iTech will contact them shortly. At any time, the customer can cancel the service request by directly responding to that text. On the backend, iCracked sends an SMS to the pool of iTechs located closest to the customer. iTechs can then respond to that text to accept the job.
Measuring technician and marketing productivity
iCracked provides every iTech with their own Twilio number, which routes to their personal phone. With an extensive inventory of U.S. and international phone numbers, Twilio enables iCracked to provision hundreds of local phone numbers on-demand. Local phone numbers have proven to boost customer credibility, leading to increased pick-up rates and conversions.
Twilio also enables call tracking and recording for each service request—critical quality control features for iCracked to measure technician productivity, ensure business isn’t conducted outside of the system and learn from various scenarios to continually improve service.
In addition, approximately 25% of customers come through iCracked’s marketing campaigns run on SmartCars, billboards, and Yelp listings. By assigning a unique Twilio phone number to each campaign, the company can efficiently test demand for new geographies, and allocate resources accordingly.
Real-time customer communications
Twilio Voice enables inbound and outbound click-to-call functionality from iCracked’s mobile or desktop app. This allows customers to easily communicate with iCracked’s concierge customer service team. In addition, both iTechs and customers can directly call each other if any issues arise while a service request is in progress. This significantly reduces friction for higher conversion, and increases customer satisfaction.
One project on the horizon is a distributed international call center built on Twilio, which will expand current call center capabilities. As a result, managers will be able to better track customer support activity and the Concierge Team will be able to transfer live customer calls directly to an iTech in the field, creating efficiency and customer satisfaction gains.
Since 2012, iCracked has connected its certified technicians with more than 300,000 customers, supporting the company’s innovative approach to streamline selling and buyback processes of iOS devices and to automate customer communications.
Twilio's APIs are powerful and flexible, allowing us to create new functionality in just a couple of days. Our imagination is often the limitation.
Due to iCracked’s continued growth, Twilio has proven to be more economically viable—less expensive than alternative solutions on a per-minute basis. In addition, it has been able to scale without any hiccups. In March 2013, iCracked sent more than 200,000 SMS notifications and used more than 160,000 voice minutes per month—numbers that are growing at a rate of approximately 15% per month.
In addition, Twilio gives iCracked the power and functionality to deliver, measure, and constantly improve service quality. For iCracked, everything boils down to customer service. “Our customers really like how easy it is to use,” said Amps. “They can put in a request and within 60 seconds are notified that their request has been received and a local iTech will contact them very soon.” Amps shared that, since the company has been using Twilio, he hasn’t received any complaints about communications—a perfect case of no news is good news!