About
Silvercar is a car rental business that offers fully loaded silver Audi A4s, eliminates lines, counters, paperwork, and hassles through a mobile app and concierge service. Silvercar is continually earning the highest customer satisfaction and loyalty scores in the industry.
Industry
Car Rentals
Location
Austin, TX
Company Size
150-200 employees
The Story
You just arrived in the airport after a twelve hour international flight, remembering you need to rent a car for the weekend. You don’t want to get trapped in long lines and wait times. A few clicks on your smartphone’s app store and you’re all set up with Silvercar—the rental car service that allows you to manage an entire rental car experience, from reservation to return, via your smartphone. Silvercar makes the complicated process of renting a car easy, but inside of their own organization, the process of communicating with employees wasn’t so simple.
In the fall Silvercar began to go through organizational changes. They began to add products and reorganize around product teams, and in doing so, they discovered they didn’t have much of a pulse on their organization. They wanted to figure out how employees were feeling, and what the point of emphasis needed to be to get back to an intentional focus on company culture.
As an innovative and young company, Silvercar wanted to partner with a company that had a similar culture to fit their internal employee engagement needs. “We chose Workify because much like us, they are a young company,” Leigh Duecy, Director of Human Resources at Silvercar says. “Workify is young, quick, nimble, fast-paced, and based in Austin. When we met Workify they were collaborative, interested in helping out, and it just seemed like a great fit.”
Leigh is a manager at Silvercar, and she’s in constant communication with her team. She assumed that these frequent conversations with her team meant that communication was going well. What she didn’t realize was that this method was not necessarily the way employees received communication the best.
After initial Workify results began to pour in, Leigh started to realize that although employee communication was frequent, it wasn’t generating the same type of discussions that one-on-one meetings would. Her employees were missing out on the large interpersonal aspect of an employee-to-manager relationship.
“We started to do that now and we’re walking away and going to get a coffee. The types of conversation will be very different,” Leigh says. “The ease where I can give feedback one-on-one instead of with everyone in a room will be much better and easier. I’m looking forward to it.”
After implementing this small change, Leigh’s team has began to feel like their voices are being heard. Employees now feel like they have a voice in helping the company progress. Silvercar has a 93 percent participation rate on follow-up surveys, a high 80’s participation on baseline surveys, and these aren’t the only results Silvercar has seen.
“Workify is young, quick, nimble, fast-paced, and based in Austin. When we met Workify they were collaborative, interested in helping out, and it just seemed like a great fit.”
Leigh Duecy – Director of Human Resources at Silvercar
USER FRIENDLY & SIMPLE TO IMPLEMENT
The Workify tool has been simple and effective. Surveys only take about two minutes depending on how descriptive the questions are, and employees have found the tool to be user-friendly. This success comes after initial skepticism of setting up the Workify platform.
Like many other companies, Silvercar was under the false impression that undertaking something with as much value—and seemingly as large—as an employee engagement survey is a daunting task and tall order.
“You kind of dread what the results are going to be, and how are we going to roll this out?” Leigh says. “This tool was very easy. From the administration side to actually taking the survey, all around it was super simple. I couldn’t ask for anything easier or better.”
Silvercar’s ability to see survey results recording in real time added to their satisfaction. When the tool was first installed, Kay Stroman, Chief Administrative Officer for Silvercar, stood in front of the platform’s dashboard watching surveys roll-in. At that moment she was already gaining an indication of where the company stood. She didn’t have to wait days or weeks to receive results. By the time final tally was in, it was simply a confirmation of what she had already seen in real time.
The leadership and executive teams are very serious about employee engagement since seeing Workify results. They have committed more time to focusing on employee one-on-one meetings and team communication. “They’re spending more time with their people, because at the end of the day, you’ve got two responsibilities as the executive of a company,” Kay says. “Set the strategic direction, then make sure that resources that you have—your people—are able to go achieve it.”
Silvercar has always hung their hat on their NPS scores. They are about five times the industry average. The idea of implementing the measurement of eNPS was not new to anyone on the team or anyone in their field. “The real tangible benefit we’re going to see is how an even more engaged workforce is going to impact that NPS, our customer NPS score as well,” Kay says. The NPS scores are great predictors of repeat performance and word of mouth marketing.
“The real tangible benefit we’re going to see is how an even more engaged workforce is going to impact that NPS, our customer NPS score as well”
Kay Stroman – Chief Administrative Officer at Silvercar