A garage that is really there when a car breaks down
Salim runs the fleet at one of Oman's biggest car rental companies, based in Muscat.
Listen to the story:
The challenge
When a tourist breaks down on the road to Nizwa, his team calls the nearest garage on their list. Too often it has closed, moved, or changed its number. The tourist waits in forty degree heat, and the company pays for a tow from across town.
How the flow works
With xMap Flows, Salim built Sentinel. Sentinel is an AI employee: a flow of 6 blocks.
Every Sunday morning,
Every Sunday morning (Schedule)
Sentinel takes the company's list of partner garages,
Our partner garages (My data)
looks each one up again,
Each garage, looked up (Map business scan)
spots the ones that closed or changed their number,
Closed or new number (What changed)
finds a well rated garage near each one that closed,
A good garage nearby (Nearby places)
and sends the fleet team the fixed list.
To the fleet team (Email)
What it solves
- Garages on list closed: solved by Map business scan and What changed
- Tourists left waiting: solved by Nearby places and Email
- Tows from across town: solved by Nearby places
The result
On Sunday, Sentinel finds two garages that closed and three with a new number, and a well rated garage near each one that closed. The list is right before the week starts. On Tuesday a car broke down near Seeb, and help came in twenty minutes.
Salim's garage list used to age in a drawer. Now it checks itself every week.
An illustrative scenario: the figures are modelled to show what the flow produces, not a customer's results.
The flow, block by block
- 1
- 2
Our partner garages
Brings in a table you uploaded or a list you saved on the My data page: your stores, customers, target accounts or sites.
- 3
Each garage, looked up
Finds businesses on online maps live: name, category, rating, address, phone, website and whether it is open.
- 4
Closed or new number
Lets through only the places this flow found before whose details changed since: closed, a rating that moved, a new phone or website, a new name or address, or any field you name.
- 5
A good garage nearby
Places around a point from xMap’s own places database (300M+ places, refreshed every month): pick the types of place (more than 5,000, such as Restaurant, Cafe, Pharmacy, Hospital or Gas station, or a whole group of them) and how far to look.
- 6
Templates to build it
Ready-made flows with the same blocks. Open one, change the city and the kind of place, and run it.
- Reputation programme for my clientsA full reputation programme for every client: ratings watched, an action plan and a review request, daily.
- Clients that closed or changed, for my insolvency teamClient businesses that closed, moved or changed, with what to do.
- Alarm monitoring clients that closed or movedMonitoring clients that closed, moved or changed, with the next step.
- Stockists that closed or moved, off the store locatorStockists that closed or moved, taken off the store locator.
- Partner restaurants that closed or movedPartner restaurants that closed, moved or changed, for account managers.
- Monthly store closures indexTracked shops that closed, as a monthly index.
Industries
Learn how it works
- POI data (points of interest)Records of places such as shops, clinics and offices, with their category, position and details.
- Competitor mappingKnowing where competitors are, what opens and how they are rated.
- Outlet universeThe complete list of points of sale a brand could sell through.
- The xMap Flows browser extension: what is around this businessOn a company’s website or a place on a map, one click shows its market and the AI employees to hire for it.
- Build your first flow in ten minutesFrom a blank page to a flow that emails you a ranked list every morning.
- What xMap remembers about your companyYour city, industry and what you sell, filled in for you and always yours to change.
More stories from Transport & mobility
- Drivers in place before the storm breaksLinh leads driver operations at one of Hanoi's biggest motorbike taxi services.
- Bikes at every dock on the hottest dayLars runs operations for a big city bike share in Copenhagen.
- Eight cabs that hear about a closure firstRahul owns eight cabs that do airport runs in Bengaluru. He drives one of them himself.
- Every customer at the airport with time to spareDiego runs a small car rental business near the airport in Mexico City.
Build this flow on your own city
Run a live search on the home page without an account, or let Ask xMap build the flow from one sentence.