How HONK drives support efficiency with thorough phone integrations

Your car just broke down on the side of a busy road. How do you feel? Probably stressed. What do you do now? Great question.

Los Angeles-based HONK is solving roadside assistance for today’s on-demand world. It’s a complete technology solution that provides the fastest and most reliable way back to mobility.

HONK connects motorists with on-demand towing and roadside assistance from it’s curated Service Provider Network for services like changing a tire, jump starts, fuel delivery, lockouts, and towing your car. Motorists only pay for the services they need, with no annual membership fees, requesting service all right from their phone using the HONK Roadside Assistance App, resulting in shorter wait times. HONK works with high-quality Service Providers to help them grow their business and receive completed job payments within minutes, not days or weeks. They also manage roadside assistance programs for several top insurance carriers.

Why Aircall?

HONK needed a new voice solution because their previous phone system didn't offer the visibility or flexibility their scaling business needed.

Aircall is used by many departments, but it’s especially valuable for connecting in-house support specialists with their international counterparts — for training and onboarding purposes. HONK’s Manager of Marketplace Operations, Mavet Carranza, explains why Aircall was the right fit:

“Aircall check-marked some of the most important boxes on our list: affordability, straightforward integration, and a pleasant user experience.”

Having doubled over the past two years, Aircall’s platform can keep up with their team’s pace of growth.

“A big factor in choosing Aircall was being able to meet growing demand. Just making sure that we had enough agents to answer the inquiries that were coming in at the time gave us the option for scalability to our other offices.”

Zendesk + Aircall

HONK’s support team mainly communicates with “service-provider-touchpoints,” or the tow professionals in the field while performing the towing and roadside assistance jobs.

To stay on top of tickets, they use Zendesk — along with its Aircall integration — on a daily basis. Aircall’s native CTI with Zendesk means agents can use the Aircall widget alongside their Zendesk inbox in the same window.

“We picked up Aircall because of that super simple, easy integration.”

To evenly distribute calls, HONK’s agents have set up a round-robin call routing structure in Aircall. When contacts dial into the support line, Zendesk automatically creates a new ticket, but it also pulls up any other ticket related to that same phone number. This allows them to view a full contact history and determine if it's a recurring issue or a brand new one.

Easy access to call recordings has been helpful when conducting QA analysis or sharing ticket-related context across departments. Recordings are especially useful when transferring escalations to supervisors and assigning calls to different agents.

“There are certain things that some agents are really good at or specialize in, like credit card disputes, for instance. Agents can transfer that call over to the correct person and get things resolved quickly.”

HONK tries to keep service provider-communications within their own native app, but they recognize a true phone line is an essential part of any business.

“We do have service providers that call in and that's why we're using Aircall — it keeps everything centralized for those people who are more comfortable with a phone call.”

Monitoring Data and Reporting

HONK also uses Aircall to help measure their efficiency, looking at both response and resolution time.

“We try to answer all of the phone calls within 30 seconds. We also want to see how quickly we’re resolving issues over the phone.”

HONK doesn't want agents spending 15 or 20 minutes on a call because that could cause long on-hold times, preventing them from responding to urgent inquiries as they come in.

“We want to make sure that all inquiries are being answered, so we look at average talk time to make sure that that's possible. Right now it's around five minutes or so.”

Aircall data also assists with staffing HONK looked at call abandonment percentages to understand what times agents were likely to miss calls. It’s allowed them to create more effective schedules for agents.

“Prior to having a solution like Aircall, our reporting metrics were convoluted. It was really difficult to be able to see where our areas of opportunity were and how we could properly staff. I couldn't tell you whether 8:00 AM or 4:00 PM was our busiest call time. But with Aircall, I've been able to track those trends a lot easier, especially now, with the new metrics.”

With the Aircall data, HONK has a clear idea of why exactly their service providers choose to call in. This has helped identify areas of improvement for service provider support.

Furthermore, Mavet Carranza, HONK’s Manager of Marketplace Operations, explains how this has improved insights into agent performance metrics.

“I can see what times our agents are logging in, what times they're logging out. I can track and make sure if something looks off, I can ask the manager there and ask them to follow up. Operations have been streamlined and it's given us great visibility.”

Remote Capabilities Were A Plus

Because HONK has support staff located in the USA and the Philippines, their executive team was aware of how COVID-19 might impact business operations before many other US-based companies. They were testing Aircall’s remote-work capabilities three weeks before California officially began its social distancing measures.

“The fact that agents were able to pick up their laptop computers, get some headphones, and work directly from their homes is something that we would not have been able to do with our previous phone solution. They would have had to take their phones with them, and there would have been a lot more confusion without Aircall.”

As a test-run, everyone worked from home on a designated Friday and proactively addressed issues agents might encounter in a fully-virtual setting.

“I think it was very seamless and very easy.”

By the time work-from-home was a statewide policy, HONK was able to make the transition seamlessly and without issues.

“If we didn’t have Aircall, we might've had to shut off our phone support until we identified a solution. With Aircall, we've been able to continue work as normal, no hiccups. I was really appreciative of that.”