ClickMechanic launched in 2012 with a vision of making car care easy for everyone everywhere. ClickMechanic helps to facilitate an easy and trusted car repair experience for both drivers and mechanics through its industry-first platform. They have connected 100,000s of drivers with thousands of mechanics; helping car owners maintain their vehicles, and enabling mechanics to grow their business without the hassle.
From the customer side, it’s easy to see why they’ve had such success in the UK. Being stuck at a co-working space because your car malfunctioned is no fun Friday afternoon. Between vetting a new mechanic, working out a fair price, and getting the job done there’s a long way home. That’s where ClickMechanic steps in, arranging everything for both garage or mobile mechanics and customers, and that’s why it’s critical to have a team that excels in team collaboration to deliver that level of quality.
Checking with people every day without coming on too strong
The team at ClickMechanic is remote-first, so everyone contributes from their place of choice. In early January, after some time off to recharge, the operational team came by with the idea of improving collaboration across the board (new year resolution, anyone?)
After running several standups manually on Slack, the team began looking for a better system, then Ali, ClickMechanic’s Head of Operations, discovered DailyBot and suggested they try it. Soon, they discovered:
- 📄 DailyBot retained the simplicity of asynchronous communication on Slack without leaving any important conversation behind.
- 📣 There was a noticeable reduction of calls, as well as an increase in transparency and visibility of their daily work.
Before that, Ali felt uneasy about reaching out to her peers for updates several times a day—she wanted to keep everyone in the loop, but she also didn't want to impose on their time. She decided to give DailyBot a try, and thanks to the bot's middleman capabilities, Ali can now communicate with her peers without them feeling like she's micromanaging.
As an all-in-one platform for chat, DailyBot demonstrated that asynchronous collaboration and daily standups weren’t an either/or issue, so ClickMechanic adopted DailyBot to help everyone organize their day and communicate their blockers, with the added benefits of having this entire system automated, all while living on Slack.
A healthy remote culture and other features: the aftermath
Louanne and Kurt from ClickMechanic’s Growth team also saw positive results after the adoption. Kurt, for instance, now sees value in using a bot to help go through their weekly team check-ins, and he recognizes a change in behavior that has brushed up on their best practices. He shares a useful practice:
Planning and learning every week — right from the chat
They sit down at the beginning of the week and go through the plan that was made last week, mainly to try to understand what was achieved from that.
It’s also useful for them to use their reports to check back during the week what are the main objectives in place. For ClickMechanic, DailyBot also helps to maintain visibility on weekly goals and objectives across teams.
A triumph in custom automation comes from the team’s “Innovation Friday”, a weekly check-in that runs on Friday and helps the team reflect on what they’ve learned every week.
💡 Best practices like this are easy to automate on DailyBot, and any team that wants to take advantage of their chat’s asynchronous capabilities can create a template like this to pause and reflect: just set a check-in based on that template, and configure the frequency and participants.
🎓 Innovation Friday Template
Take some time to reflect on this week’s learnings, including:
* Ask your team for specifics things that stood out during the week
* Ask them for the things they consider that are worth using moving forward
At DailyBot, we call a set of best practices like this “the 1-5-1,” since it involves one day at the beginning of the week to plan, (usually) five to keep track of everyone’s work asynchronously, and one day at the end of the week to reflect on everything that happened. These practices can be easily automated with DailyBot and take about 5 minutes to set in place — essentially the time it takes you to configure 3 of our built-in templates.
More things to do
As we talk with Louanne to understand how DailyBot has changed her workflow, she reflects on the small wins of having automated assistance in her chat. She remembers how sometimes there’s potential for things to get lost in the daily tasks that you’re doing.
Before they used DailyBot, manually doing their standup in a Slack channel meant getting updates only two or three times a week on a 5-day workweek, so Kurt or other managers would have to regularly reach out to their teammates to do the standups or simply get an update.
DailyBot now helps them keep track of their daily tasks in a way that feels unobtrusive. As she highlighted, it feels OK if a chat bot pokes you to complete your standup, but it’s just different when a teammate does it.
This way, not only does DailyBot help people organize their day, but it keeps teams accountable for what they need to share to ensure a successful collaboration.
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