Beaumont Tractor Co. has been in business since 1995. It’s a true mom-and-pop shop, founded by husband-and-wife team, Sam (who sadly passed away in 2021) and Connie Morgan. What started as a small family-owned business grew into the third biggest single-location dealership in the USA and one of the top Kubota dealerships.
Arikka Morrell, Assistant Service Manager, has worked at Beaumont Tractor Co. for five years. After starting in the parts department, she’s done everything from the parts counter to the rental department, and now service. Needless to say, she knows the ins and outs of the work order process—where it’s working and where it can be improved.
After attending the Kubota Dealer Meeting and talking to the team at the DIS booth, Arikka and her Service Manager saw an opportunity to improve the customer experience at their dealership by leveraging text messaging to send more frequent service status updates to customers.
Why did you decide Notify was the right solution for your dealership?
“One of the issues that we run into a lot, especially in our service department, is customers saying that we are not contacting them when their machines are ready. They call and say, well, nobody ever called me, and we’ll say yeah, we did, and we left you a voicemail. But people don’t listen to voicemails.
I know that something like 98% of text messages get at least looked at, so that was something to help alleviate that issue.
Then also, having a paper trail where somebody would say that they approved a job and then somebody would call back and ask who approved it. We have that information about who approved it when it was done, and what amount was approved.”
Favorite Features:
- Nesting contacts
- Email attachments (quotes, documents)
- Centralized conversation records
What is the benefit of a texting solution that integrates with your DMS?
“We deal with a lot of bigger companies that have several people that work for them. So, they can come in and just say, hey, we’re with this company and I’m the contact person. With Notify, you can nest the individual contacts underneath the business, which helps because you can’t always get in touch with somebody that knows what’s going on at the normal business number.”
What kind of response have you gotten from your team now that they’re using Notify?
“My service manager likes it. He said that it’s useful to be able to send a text message instead of calling a customer. It gets to be tedious when you have to call a customer and they don’t answer, and then they call you back and say they never received a phone call.
Our service writer finds it useful to let customers know when their machines are ready. Or if we’re waiting on repairs and whatnot—he likes to be able to keep track of who he’s contacted and who hasn’t.
It’s easy to use, easy to figure out, and easy to train people on how to use.”
