Established in 2001, FreedomPark offers world-class valet reservation services primarily to the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport. With over 350 valets, they provide fast convenient guaranteed parking and pickup, as well as vehicle maintenance and service options. Being able to update their customers via SMS has revolutionized FreedomPark’s customer service experience.
FreedomPark’s primary use for SMS is to provide reservation instructions and gate information to its customers. The organization also offers extra services—from car washing to oil changes—and texting enables a quick, convenient way to provide service updates and alerts to its customers.
A software-centric approach to SMS
Moving from an SMS server to the cloud was an exploration of a variety of solutions, but it had to happen, said FreedomPark executive vice president, Steve McNeese.
“It’s basically a piece of rack-mounted hardware you could put SIM cards in. We used one that had 16 ports, and it had a RESTful API web server built into the hardware that we would interface with our software in order to send text messages,” McNeese mentioned. “The problem with that was it was on the old 2.0 protocol, which was slowly phased out,” he added.
Bouncing from one carrier to another, he knew there was a better solution out there. On top of trying to solve the 2.0 dilemma, he also needed to streamline how FreedomPark was communicating to its customers. “The SMS server had a nice round-robin feature, which was able to manage the volume. But the problem was that we would have to use different SIM cards. At one point, we had about eight SIMs, which meant we had eight different phone numbers for our customers. That became a little confusing,” McNeese said.
Finding the Telnyx SMS API
Transitioning to the cloud meant being able to find a provider that checked all of McNeese’s boxes. On top of price and service reliability, McNeese was “looking for something that was very well documented–that had a fairly sophisticated API with endpoints we could use in order to properly integrate into our back-office technology.” On top of the send and receive features, he also needed to see the statuses on those messages, too. “The Telnyx API had the automatic status update, so we’d get a webhook back as the status changed, which was really nice.”
Being able to streamline communication into one toll-free number was also a huge improvement on FreedomPark’s customer support. “SMS started out as a nice-to-have feature we offered. But it's grown out of that to become a critical piece of communication that’s expected by our customers.” Now, FreedomPark has one direct number its customers can reply to for all inquiries.
Beyond the technology
Being in the business of customer service, McNeese was big on the support Telnyx offers. With the partnership going strong and the confidence level in the relationship increasing as the Telnyx products continue to evolve, McNeese has very little doubt about the support he receives from team Telnyx:
“Your technical support team is really good at follow-up and followthrough–top-notch. This is extremely important to us because we’re in the customer service industry.”
