Alfred is a Colombia-based provider of consumer vehicle maintenance services who uses HyperTrack to provides customers with peace of mind as their cars are being serviced. We had the opportunity to speak with Alfred founder, Santiago Cala, about how HyperTrack became a growth catalyst as customers began using Alfred's services. Read the following transcript and listen to the audio recording for more on the Alfred story or watch the video for a summary.
Santiago
Okay, my name is Santiago Cala, I am currently CTO and founder at Alfred. We're a company that currently operates here in Colombia, a technical platform. For vehicle maintenance, we basically help customers that need to do an oil change, get their car washed, anything related to vehicle maintenance, we pick up their car, we take it to one of our allied shops, and then we return it back safe to them. We constantly gather information on their cars to be able to provide them with further information on their status of their car to be able to provide them with reminders on future maintenance. And basically, that's it.
Leigh Ann
What kinds of problems or issues were you facing before you started working with HyperTrack?
Santiago
Okay, so basically, since we're a company that drives people's cars, we need to provide a lot of trust and confidence for our users. Because a lot of people were actually letting us drive their cars, they actually wanted a solution that could help them know exactly where their car was at any given time. It is something that a lot of users had been asking for. So before we implemented hyper track, there was no way for our users to actually follow and track the activity in their current car. After we implemented HyperTrack, we also implemented a link to send to our users once they requested an Alfred service, which ended up being a huge hit, because our customers could now see where their car was, at what speed they were driving, and what time was the estimated time of arrival towards their allied shop or towards their home, which was great for them.
Leigh Ann
Excellent. How was not having that tracking available, affecting your company's performance or your KPIs.
Santiago
Actually, we tried to grow a lot. At that time, we needed to grow in terms of users, we needed to grow in terms of services for us to be able to raise our next round. Unfortunately, we weren't able to do so because a lot of our users wanted this live feedback from their service to be able to trust us to drive their cars. That's why we implemented HyperTrack. And in the end, we were able to grow in our user base, a lot of people started to trust us once we told them that they could track their cars via our tracking link that was powered, obviously by HyperTrack. And it was a huge change in our company.
Leigh Ann
Excellent. So how did it make you feel? And how was it affecting your team knowing that you couldn't grow because you didn't have this, this tracking option implemented?
Santiago
So as Alfred CTO, I receive a lot of pressure from all the other areas of the company such as the marketing area, the Executive area, the administrative, the operations area, to be able to provide them with the appropriate tools for them to grow. And this was something that they had been asking for a while. They had been talking to our users, as I mentioned previously, they were actually asking our users for the feedback on their service, and they wanted this live link. And they were also asking users that were potential customers that weren't customers because they didn't have this link. So having all this pressure from all the external areas of the company, it was the thing that we decided had to be priority number one for us.
Leigh Ann
That makes a lot of sense. So talk to me about that breaking point. What was having that breaking point like and what was the actual moment where you realized enough's enough, we've we have to implement a new system.
Santiago
So after a month that we didn't grow as much as we needed, obviously, as a data driven company, we started to ask our customers and to gather some feedback with surveys in order to see why certain customers weren't actually giving their keys to Alfred to be able to help them with their maintenance. That is when we realized that a lot of them were Were asking for tech support and for a live tracking link, to be able to actually trust us with their maintenance of their vehicle. That is when we decided this is something that has to be done immediately. We prioritized it in our next sprints. And that's when we developed our integration with HyperTrack, which was eventually very easy and very welcoming.
Leigh Ann
All right, so tell me about finding HyperTrack. What was that like?
Santiago
So when we were actually researching for ways to be able to provide our users with this specific live feedback of their service, we started investigating different solutions. And we came upon HyperTrack by Google, we were actually at the time a very small company, we didn't have a lot of resources, a lot of connections. And HyperTrack was one of the first we came up with, we actually started to see different documentations and different alternatives. And HyperTrack’s documentation was the best, we saw that it was the easiest to implement, we saw that it was the fastest solution. We also looked at prices, which were very favorable. And that's why we decided to make a choice. We didn't have much time, but I think it was definitely the right choice.
Leigh Ann
Perfect. What do you feel sets HyperTrack apart, you've just sort of gone into that a little. And you may find you're repeating yourself a little in this interview, and that's totally fine. But if you can go into what you find that sets HyperTrack apart.
Santiago
I think being such a young company, we looked for different alternatives, we have actually haven't implemented any of the other alternatives. But something that we're very grateful for is quick and easy documentation. Having experienced developers on board, which are an expensive resource, we need to be able to use their time effectively. So having good documentation on board, being able to implement solutions quickly, being able to implement integrations and different embeddings of the HyperTrack links was a key priority for us. And that's why we chose HyperTrack.
Leigh Ann
Perfect. So in your own words, how would you describe HyperTrack and what they do?
Santiago
I think HyperTrack is for us the best solution to be able to track our drivers. And I constantly find them as a friend in our process of growing our business. And that's why we're so happy to be able to be working with them.
Leigh Ann
Excellent. Can you talk to me a bit about how you and your team are using HyperTrack on a on a day to day basis?
Santiago
HyperTrack is actually our ally. When it comes to Geo locating our drivers and the cars that they are driving in the process, we actually install the API from a HyperTrack in our drivers mobile devices. So we can constantly track their behavior once they start a trip. This automatically feeds our customer tracking links, which our customers can see, to be able to track where their services are on a lifetime, they can see the speed, they can see the estimated time of arrival, and they can also see where their car is at any given time.
Leigh Ann
Perfect. What do you like best about HyperTrack?
Santiago
I think being able to work with HyperTrack has showed us a lot of the different benefits it offers. One of them, as I mentioned earlier, is the great documentation they have available for our developers to be able to be constantly integrating new features that HyperTrack implements into our operations. And additionally, the support they give is excellent. We have been constantly contacted by them to see how we're, how we've been using their services, how we've been doing, which is something that we as a company value a lot. And finally, I think that the ease of of connecting with HyperTrack is a great feature for us as a company.
Leigh
Excellent. Is there anything that isn't working for you about hyper tracker that you'd like to see improve?
Santiago
I think that we would like to be able to offer our customers a completely customizable link that has Alfred's branding in it. I like HyperTrack branding. It also is coincidentally similar to the colors that we use in Alfred. But I would like to be able to customize the maps and the loading screens and the different things that appear on the embedded map to be able to give our experience a more Alfred like experience rather than a HyperTrack experience.
Leigh Ann
All right. So how do you and your team feel after having implemented HyperTrack?
Santiago
In Alfred, our usage of HyperTrack depends on how many trips we're doing and how many services we're doing. So coincidentally, when I see my HyperTrack invoice grow, I know that outfit is growing. So it is actually something that makes me feel happy. Additionally, seeing how HyperTrack has provided services to our company, and the fact that we have been able to grow because our customers see the value in the HyperTrack tracking that we provide to them is also a great experience.
Leigh Ann
Excellent. What problems are you solving? And what benefits have you realized from using HyperTrack?
Santiago
I think if we wanted to implement a solution that is as robust as HyperTrack, it would have taken our team a million years to do. So. I think being able to take advantage of HyperTrack's great technology, a really good support is something that was a strategic decision for us because it helped us actually save time, it is a really fair price, and it has been an ally in the growth of our company.
Leigh Ann
Excellent. What features are you benefiting the most from and why?
Santiago
The feature we're benefiting the most from is actually the live tracking that we embed in our alpha drivers applications. This, as I mentioned earlier, feeds our customer tracking links, which are basically some of the key reasons why our customers are using Alfred rather than other alternatives. It is because they can track our users and our Alfreds in the process. And I think that this wouldn't be possible without HyperTrack. And it is one of the reasons why we're constantly using HyperTrack as well.
Leigh Ann
Great. Do you have any - and if the answer to this is no, not a problem, but if you do, do you have any KPIs or metrics of success that you're able to share with us?
Santiago
We passed from doing around 30 services per month when we started to implement hyper track. Now we're doing more than 3000 services. We have more than 11,000 customers happy customers. And we've been able to track more than 22,000 services since we started implementing HyperTrack, thanks to the technology that you guys provide.
Leigh Ann
Fantastic, that's awesome. Thank you. Do you feel that your original problem is solved or is on the way to being solved?
Santiago
I think that our problem was not being able to know where our outfits were at any given time. And now that our drivers are integrated with HyperTrack directly, we can know at any given time where every single driver is and we can also give our customers this link to be able to follow directly where their car and the Alfred that is driving their car is so I would say definitely they have solved their problems.
Leigh Ann
Perfect. And last question, would you recommend HyperTrack and if so why?
Santiago
I would definitely recommend HyperTrack. I think that it is a platform that is really easy to use to integrate with. It has great documentation and I would definitely recommend for any company that has a logistics issue to integrate with HyperTrack because it will solve all of their logistics problems.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
