Making multi-branch services smarter
At Wirebox, we’re all about solving your business challenges. When you’re a national company with a lot of branches dotted across the country, that becomes a daunting task. Today, we’ll explain just how we are making multi-branch services smarter with the application of bespoke database development.
Spotlight on Mr Clutch Autocentres
If you’ve never heard of Mr Clutch, they explain their services as “one of the premier autocentre groups in England. [They] have over forty branches across the country providing a wide range of garage services; these include the fitting of clutches, brakes and manual transmissions. [They] are also able to carry out full car servicing, general repairs and, in selected centres, MOT testing.” That last bit is essential to the issue of multi-branch services; ‘selected centres’ — how do you build a database that provides for the correct breadth and limitations of services across a large estate? Well, it’s not an out-of-the-box solution, that’s for sure.
The problem facing Mr Clutch
This national brand came to us because sales were low, they needed to account for the variations in services across their portfolio AND wanted to tap into smarter advertising. Our team felt that “One of the first hurdles was the current infrastructure being written in ASP, which worked well but adapting to the new style of coding was difficult. A lot of new features had been developed which Mr Clutch could use, but ASP plugins were not as common.” So, we decided to go future-proof and build everything using the Laravel framework. This would make the code cleaner and link everything internally for smoother operations.
Smart database development
When you’re working with multi-branch services, everything needs to talk to each other. We looked at how the internal teams worked, the CRM database for live reporting, the way customers booked and how the 3rd party services linked in to get an idea of what the infrastructure needed to support. Take Groupon, for example, that platform generated new business and had unique data needs and passthrough that our refreshed database had to contend with. So, there was an 18-month roadmap that covered all these bases. We did the rollout in phases and took stock at each stage to ensure everything was working as intended.
The result
Our Laravel development ticked all the boxes. The team created new optimised Booking Forms for all services with a Google Adwords API integration that allowed the business to understand the true CPL/CPS of each lead. Then there was a fresh digital online diary to allow bookings based on real-time availability and this took into consideration the services available at all the different garages; including limitations. Lastly, we built in eCommerce functionality so payments could be processed right on the website. The result? A 30% increase in sales conversions.
Why do you need bespoke database development?
If you’re just a few locations with centralised stocks and services, something off the shelf will work just fine (usually). But when you have differing capabilities, using a framework like Laravel to customise around your use case is a simple way to make multi-branch services smarter. If you’re just using bog-standard tools, you’re probably leaving a lot of revenue on the table.
Talk to us today about your brand setup and development needs in a quick, no-obligation chat.
