Recommend Group is a home services social recommendation platform, with operations in Malaysia (called Recommend.my) and Indonesia (called Sejasa.com). It offers homeowners and customers a space to search, review, and recommend service professionals in 200 categories, including home improvement, maintenance, events, and more. Recommend Group’s mission is to relieve the stress that comes with working on a home improvement project, by making it fast, safe, and convenient for anyone to book home and local services.
"You need to make sure the provider that you go with is able to give you local support, in your timezone. If your company is thinking about adopting SMS and WhatsApp into your communications, I would recommend 8x8."
With the Recommend Group’s main offering being matching customers to the right service professionals, it means a lot of communication happening between the different parties. A typical user flow starts with the customer requesting a service, receiving different price quotes, assigning the job to the right provider, coordinating appointments, informing on the job status, confirming payments, and more.
Previously, the Recommend Group used emails to send updates and notifications to both customers and service professionals. However, they noticed that many of the service requests were not converting into job completions. “We found that when we were sending emails, customers wouldn’t open them in time,” said Alex Tan, co-founder of Recommend Group. “So using email wasn’t ideal as a lot of status updates really needed to be seen right there and then.”
The key objective was to have users, both customers and service professionals, respond to the time-sensitive updates. With a higher read rate than email at 42%, as well as it being device-agnostic and not requiring mobile data for message delivery, Recommend Group decided to make the switch to SMS.
And through word-of-mouth, Recommend Group found 8×8’s communication APIs, specifically SMS and WhatsApp.
When Recommend Group was sourcing an SMS service provider back in 2019, they had two main criteria. One, it needed to be able to provide local customer and technical support, preferably within the same timezone. Second, it needed to have a close working relationship with local telecommunication partners in order to promptly resolve any message deliverability issues. 8×8 Communication APIs checked all those boxes.
Today, Recommend Group sends around 15,000 SMS every week to customers and service professionals located in Indonesia and Malaysia. Using 8×8 SMS API, they are sending one-time passwords (OTP) for account sign-ups and service requests, notifications for job status updates, customer surveys, and automated promotional campaigns.
Beyond SMS APIs, the marketing team at Recommend Group also uses 8×8 Connect as their campaign management platform to send out ad-hoc, targeted SMS marketing campaigns. “The 8×8 Connect interface is easy to use. Our marketing team can log on and send whatever marketing campaigns to a segment of their users.”
With job completions being their north star KPI, it is important for Recommend Group to be able to keep a close eye on their message deliverability rate. A high deliverability rate is an indicator that their users receive all time-sensitive updates. With 8×8 Connect’s SMS analytics dashboard, the team is able to monitor the key metrics and respond to any issues immediately. “The logs, they are quick to load up. We can see the patterns and export them for analysis needed”.
Post-integration, 8×8 continued supporting the team at Recommend Group. “Our account manager has been very responsive to any enquiries, and has also kept me up to date on the latest improvements. At the same time, whenever our development team encountered issues, the technical support team was very helpful and timely in resolving them.”
After integrating with 8×8 SMS API, Recommend Group saw their SMS click-through rates tripled as compared to email, especially in Indonesia. This translates to customers and service professionals opening job status messages, contributing to an increased likelihood of a job being picked up and taken to completion.
As Recommend Group was scaling their operations through automated communications, they discovered a tendency of customers ignoring SMS, thinking that it came from a bot. This pain point was tackled by introducing WhatsApp, the most ubiquitous chat app in the markets they were serving, humanizing interactions where they needed customers’ replies. They were able to do so quickly by integrating with WhatsApp API through 8×8’s chat apps solution. On top of that, the chat apps solution came with an agent dashboard, 8×8 Converse, allowing Recommend Group to set up customer service workflows without the need to procure an additional management platform.
“You need to make sure the provider that you go with is able to give you local support, in your timezone,” said Alex. “If your company is thinking about adopting SMS and WhatsApp into your communications, I would recommend 8×8.”
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