Problems: Keeping up with day-to-day reminders and customer communications.
- Reduce time spent making cold calls.
- Ensure customers get reminders since they don’t listen to voicemail.
- Get payment reminders out in a timely fashion.
Cash N’ Go is a payday lender located in Oxford Mississippi, offering short-term loans to customers.
Kailyn, the manager, has been at the Oxford location since they first opened in 2019. The Cash N’ Go is relatively small. For the most part, it’s up to Kailyn and her General Manager to take care of day-to-day business.
For regular customers, it’s all about providing them with a family-like experience. Even though it’s just the two of them, Kailyn and her General Manager both take it upon themselves to prioritize customer needs and provide a friendly, communicative experience.
Because Cash N’ Go values communication, Kailyn tries to stay in contact with lenders throughout the life cycle of their loan.
Cold calling was the Cash N’ Go team’s communications solution for years. All loan applicants needed reminders and those with outstanding debts got personal phone calls.
But cold calls take time and Kailyn found herself spending the majority of her days on the phone. She recalls spending 50 to 75% of her day making cold calls.
Not only did it take up most of her day, but it also proved ineffective.
“A lot of our customers didn't even have their voicemail set up. So that was difficult because you couldn't leave a message. Very few customers would respond.”
Even though Kailyn was spending up to 75% of her day making phone calls to customers, she wasn’t seeing any results after all that hard work.
“It’s vital in keeping in contact with our customers and making sure that nothing falls through the cracks. Customers weren't getting reminders because you know, we're all human, so we would forget.”
But missing reminder calls in the payday loan business simply isn’t an option. Not calling every customer puts Cash N’ Go behind on loan repayment.
All Kailyn needed to fix this problem was to have a way to schedule a message to go out to her customers. Additionally, she wanted there to be a way to store copies of the reminder messages she used frequently. Kailyn also wanted to improve her customers’ experience with more personalized messaging.
“Basically, the problem we wanted to solve was not having to remember to go back in and schedule reminders or physically type reminders for customer loans. We also wanted to send courtesy messages to say things like happy birthday. But we didn't want to have to manually go in and do that every time something came up.”
The solutions she needed were simple but would make the team’s life so much easier.
- Reminding customers of payment due dates without spending all day on the phone.
- Scheduling messages to go out ahead of time.
- Not typing the same message over and over.
Solutions: Saving time with more personalized scheduled text message reminders.
- Scheduling messages in advance to avoid missed communication.
- Text message templates for frequently used messages.
After briefly trying out various customer communication platforms, Kailyn didn’t see a big improvement in her day-to-day productivity. The platforms she had found couldn’t schedule messages.
“Scheduling is super important. It's very important for our business, because like I said, customers don't always answer the phone.”
Eventually, Kailyn and the rest of the staff at Cash N’ Go decided to switch platforms. It seemed as though the platform they were using was not solving the problems that actually needed solving.
“We wanted to simplify things. Not being able to schedule or have a template makes things very complicated. That's the one thing we needed - templates.”
That’s when Cash N’ Go found MessageDesk.
“It only took about 10 minutes to just completely understand what to do.”
The days of forgetting reminders were over.
“Before, if we missed correspondence with the customer and they were late we’d have to take them to court. MessageDesk helps us avoid all of this and makes it easy to just keep tabs of when the customer contacted us and when we've contacted them.”
And, with that, Cash N’ Go hit the ground running.
“Now we're able to welcome new customers with MessageDesk. We send out text messages using a template saying ‘thank you for joining the Cash N’ Go family.’”
Kailyn made it clear that proactive communication and texting helps set Cash N’ Go apart from the typical stereotypes associated with payday loan offices.
Despite what people may assume about payday loan offices, Kailyn makes it a point to go the extra mile and make every single customer feel valued and respected.
“I feel like other companies, because they're bigger, don't really take the time to make that personal connection with every single customer. We make it our duty to remember their name when they walk in the door. You don't have to do that as a company, but if you do that just means you're going the extra mile. MessageDesk helps us go the extra mile.
Results: Getting more payments on-time payments and still going the extra mile with less time on the phone.
- On-time loan payments increased by 30%.
- Cut daily phone time by 50%.
Thankfully, Kailyn doesn’t have to worry about loose ends anymore. She just makes it a point to schedule messages.
“As soon as the customer walks out the door, I'm scheduling a text message to be sent out. And then I'm onto another task. MessageDesk freed up a lot of my time to do other things.”
Kailyn is also taking advantage of MessageDesk’s call forwarding feature. This allows Kailyn to forward any calls that are made from her MessageDesk number to her business line.
It also has the added benefit of helping her keep track of when a contact calls her.
“We're able to remind customers five days before, three days before, and on the day of their loan. So that way we stay in contact and if they need to call us, they call that number. MessageDesk also shows us when they've called. So I can call that number back on our store phone and make sure we're not missing any correspondence with any customers.”
Her customers are getting a better experience every time they interact with Kailyn and her staff. On top of that, Kailyn is also more productive throughout the day.
“The office is much more productive. I like not having to be on the phone as much as I used to. So basically I’m only spending about 25% of my time on the phone. That's just because I have calls coming in and then I'm not calling to remind customers anymore. So that took out a lot of time.”
Because Kailyn was able to stop spending up to 75% of her day on the phone she had more time to focus on the business itself. Cash N’ Go even launched a new website.
Even better, she’s already seeing an increase in the number of loans paid on time.
“There has been a, probably about 25 to 30% increase of people who come in on time. For those who can't come in on time, because we schedule reminders early, like days before they'll call us days before and say, ‘Hey, I'm not going to be here because of this reason.’”
Moving Forward:
In the future, Kailyn is looking to expand her use of MessageDesk.
Since Cash N’ Go launched their new website they’re expecting a significant increase in business.
“We just launched our website recently just this past week. We’re expecting business to increase by over 50%.”
And they plan on increasing the number of text messages they send to customers.
“We're definitely going to be increasing our usage with MessageDesk just because we'll have more customers. Definitely looking forward to growing with y'all.”