Case Study - Signature Appraisals

The Client

Chris Buchholtz is Managing Director of Signature Appraisals, a privately held underwriting and loss control business based in Minneapolis, which provides inspection and loss control services to the property and casualty insurance industry throughout the USA. At the end of 2018 he was searching for a cost-effective text reminder service which would work easily for all his staff and clients who were based across multiple US states and time-zones.

The Problem

Chris took a free trial of SMS Client Reminders and liked the way the system operated, however there were a few things that it did not currently do in the way that he required, so he made contact with us and explained what he wanted to achieve. His business has many insurance inspectors based across the US who undertake on-site inspections with each client. Each inspector is supported by a controller who manages their workload and calendars, but the controller is often based in a different location and time-zone to the inspectors that they manage. This posed several challenges in trying to find a system that could send text reminders to every client and display the correct time and time-zone for each appointment wherever they were located.

In addition, Chris wanted any text replies coming back from the clients to be sent as an email alert directly to the controller that was managing the relevant inspector, instead of going to a central email address at their head office. The controller would then need to be able to easily and quickly communicate back to the client by text, without having to log-in to the reminder admin system.

The Solution

After exploring these requirements further with Chris we could see that, although some of the technical solutions were quite complex, what he was looking for could also be of value to other clients operating across multiple time-zones in the USA and Canada. So we agreed to develop a number of enhancements to the system in order to meet all of his needs. These new features were developed and deployed in several stages over two to three months in order to allow his team to test and become familiar with each one, while providing valuable feedback to our development team along the way.

The Benefits

Signature Appraisals has now been using all the new functionality provided by SMS Client Reminders for several months and the system is proving to be a very effective solution to enhance their client scheduling process. The benefits that have been achieved include:

• Reduced the number of "no show" appointments
• Reduced the number of cancellations from clients
• Positive feedback from clients in regards to being able to offer this service

Chris says about SMS Client Reminders and the new features that have been developed:

"SMS Client Reminders has been a wonderful resource that we have added to our company. The support we have received from the programmers and customer service staff has been amazing. The basic program in itself was good but they really listened to our needs and helped develop a program that worked specifically for our company. This resource is consistently helping our inspectors improve their productivity by cutting down on no show appointments."