Customer Story
SMS automation saves time and boosts service for Swimming Pool Kits Direct
Customer Story
Challenge: Create consistent customer journeys and keep track of communication
Solution: Use SMS integration to centralise and automate customer communication
Results: Serious time savings and enhanced customer service
“I definitely had a vision of a much cleaner, simpler, more straightforward way of doing things. Ultimately, we always want to find ways to free up people’s time so they can have better, high-quality conversations with customers, rather than having to do manual tasks.“
For Swimming Pool Kits Direct, a shift to Sinch led to seamless customer communication, a jump in campaign engagement, and some serious time-savings for employees.
New South Wales-based Swimming Pool Kits Direct supplies fibreglass swimming pools to customers all over Australia. Led by owner Colm Walsh, the small business aims to deliver the ‘Australian dream’ of pool ownership in an affordable, customer-centric way.
The business was using an outdated system that made it difficult for the sales team to track customer communications or create consistent customer journeys, which sparked a successful shift to Sinch SMS.
When Colm Walsh bought Swimming Pool Kits Direct in 2022, he promised himself he wouldn’t make changes for the first year. That plan went out the window when he saw opportunities for real improvement, just by digitising and automating communications.
The previous system saw individual sales reps sending messages to customers on their personal phones, which meant there was no record of communications or customer responses.
Worse, the lack of connection between the sales system and communications meant double-handling, lost messages and missed sales opportunities.
“It was a really antiquated system that delivered a lot of headaches in terms of inefficiencies, double-handling and separate, non-connected systems,” explains Colm. “Basically, our reps had their own phones with their own messages on them. There wasn’t team visibility around how communications were happening, or where or when, and there was no automation, either.”
Colm set about ripping out Swimming Pool Kits Direct’s old systems and looking for a better solution – for customers and employees.
“I definitely had a vision of a much cleaner, simpler, more straightforward way of doing things,” he says. “Ultimately, we always wanted to find ways to free up people’s time so they can have better, high-quality conversations with customers, rather than having to do manual tasks.”
That goal led the business to Sinch, thanks to its fully-featured platform, local support, domain expertise and ability to integrate with existing software.
The business uses Sinch for:
It didn’t take long for the Swimming Pool Kits Direct team to see results after the Sinch implementation.
Automating SMS workflows through the new platform helps streamline customer communication and saves real time. The sales team – just three people – reaches out to roughly 100 customers, new and existing, each week. With the old system, this meant a lot of manual work and copy-paste messages.
With Sinch, sales reps create triggered message workflows, set up to send personalised SMS messages at specific points in the sales cycle. This saves each rep up to three hours a week – and gives customers a consistent experience with the brand. For a business with a long sales cycle, this kind of consistency is crucial.
“Being able to communicate things and keep them informed and on track is super important, and that’s the experience that we want to deliver,” says Colm.
Sinch also changed the way Colm and his team manage marketing campaigns. Instead of relying only on email, they use SMS to send information about sales and offers. This approach has been a game-changer – a recent split-tested campaign showed a 55% increase in engagement and conversions when SMS was used alongside email.
After three years, the Sinch platform has made a significant difference in both time savings and service improvement. And Swimming Pool Kits Direct customers seem to agree – the business has 100% five-star reviews on Google, with customer service the top-rated area.
And Colm explains that the Sinch experience has been a positive for his team as well.
“Just having that cut-through and trust, and having a platform that knows how to handle these things has really helped us,” he says. “So it’s been an awesome experience for our business, working with Sinch and having a seamless experience there.”
The business is more than happy with the results so far, but it’s always looking for ways to improve customer service and operations.
“I always look for opportunities to do things differently,” says Colm, “and where we can have the opportunity to be a leader in the space, where it makes sense and our customers like it.”
Two possible future changes – both supported by Sinch – are implementing WhatsApp as an alternative messaging channel and using an AI chatbot to handle customer enquiries on the website.
Whatever the function, Colm is confident that Sinch will be able to deliver.
“Sinch delivers a ton of value for us. It just works, and it keeps getting better,” he explains.
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