How Hiyacar is building a community with Intercom

To help essential workers providing COVID-19 relief, UK peer-to-peer car sharing service Hiyacar has made its service free to National Health Service (NHS) workers and other key individuals.

Founded in 2016, Hiyacar’s goal has always been to connect drivers with trusted local car owners. Drivers can rent affordable cars nearby and car owners can earn an extra income by hiring their idle cars out to vetted and verified drivers.

With this latest initiative, Hiyacar is assisting workers in London and Brighton who normally take the train or tube in an effort to keep them healthy and safe. So far they’ve provided over 882 days of bookings to NHS or emergency service staff & volunteers. Their Quickstart keyless technology means that workers can download a virtual key and start driving without needing to meet car owners.

We recently sat down with the Hiyacar team to learn about how they’ve been able to build this community of drivers and car owners using Intercom.

The time for peer-to-peer car sharing is now

There are nearly 40 million licensed vehicles in Great Britain alone – most of which are only in use for 4% of their lifetime, spending the other 96% of the time parked at home or elsewhere.

For Robert Larmour and Graeme Risby, these statistics were the driving force behind the creation of Hiyacar.

From day one, Hiyacar has made a conscious effort to foster easy communication within its community – whether that’s between its members who are renting and hiring out cars, or between their members and the Hiyacar team. Intercom has been the key to that communication, allowing the company to engage in nearly 100,000 conversations in the past two years and helping the company reach its goal of building a vibrant community.

“Hiyacar has handled almost 100,000 new conversations through Intercom in the last two years”

Delivering 24/7 support to thousands of members

Since hiring out Graeme’s own car in February 2016, Hiyacar has welcomed over 100,000 members to its platform.

“No one at Hiyacar HQ joined because they love car hire. For us, it’s about connecting people in their local communities and, by doing that, changing mobility for the better.

By talking, and more importantly, listening to our members we have heard how drivers are looking for everyday cars for everyday use. That could be a trip to the shop, running errands, taking their kids to the beach, attending important events, days with friends and more.”

Using Messages, Inbox, Articles, and Resolution Bot, Hiyacar has handled almost 100,000 new conversations through Intercom in the last two years.

The flexibility of the Messenger has been crucial to Hiyacar’s success in driving customer satisfaction, allowing members to remain supported 24/7.

Recent TrustPilot review

Since implementing Resolution Bot to help with their members’ most common queries, almost 10% of conversations coming to Hiyacar are being picked up by the intelligent bot.

In the past year alone, this has saved Hiyacar’s team over 120 hours, which they’ve used to focus on helping members with more in-depth queries through the Messenger on their website and app.

Hiyacar’s Resolution Bot provides instant answers

The road ahead

For Hiyacar, Intercom is doing more than helping the company to support and grow its member base.

“We got Intercom in just for the live chat, but you can do a lot more with it as well. We tag every conversation that comes in now and it’s helping us to analyze and report back on what the big failure demands are that we can improve on.

Intercom and live chat isn’t just for our support team. Our tech guys are on there all the time, our developers, our designers, our growth team and more.”

At Intercom, we’re proud to support Hiyacar in their mission: to support Covid-19 relief in the near-term and transform car rental through peer-peer car sharing in the long-term.