As the most comprehensive vehicle-history database in North America, CARFAX has become the #1 place where millions of car buyers and sellers can glean valuable information about a vehicle’s history. This includes everything they need to know about cars and light truck models (1981 and later), such as title information, accident and flood history, and much more.
Jim Sharifi is the content manager at CARFAX. From producing the CARFAX blog to managing freelancers at every corner, Sharifi has seen welcomed spikes in productivity thanks to the company’s partnership with ClearVoice. This has allowed him to operate more efficiently and eliminate the most time-consuming areas of content management, such as scaling content.
But don’t take our word for it. Sharifi took time to drive home why the CARFAX partnership with ClearVoice has worked so well thus far.
Challenges
When you’re juggling all the responsibilities on a content manager’s plate, the last thing you need is to spend long days negotiating rates, for inferior work, with freelance writers whose expertise is clearly lacking in several key areas. After all, generating content isn’t always a seamless, simplistic process fraught with joy, laughter and free back rubs.
To the contrary, Sharifi confesses, “Tracking assignments, managing files and maintaining a content calendar was a multi-task ordeal — not to mention the flurry of emails that came in from our contributors around the clock.”
As a result, that left Sharifi in search of a way to streamline things — and he found one in the form of “a workflow solution that made [his] life a lot less complicated.” Ultimately, the results of this ClearVoice partnership have left a positive imprint on Sharifi: “[We have] better planning, clearer communication with my freelance staff, and more time to focus how we can improve and grow.”
Solutions
When asked about the number-one place where Sharifi and his CARFAX team needed help? He responds with one word: communication.
Sharifi had this praise for ClearVoice. “ClearVoice messaging, and the ability to send back articles for edits, helps everyone get on the same page,” says Sharifi. “I also love that clear instructions can be included with each assignment, and that they’re easy to view while you’re writing or editing.”
Having a quick, clear lens into the communication funnel is a good thing when you’re dealing with multiple freelancers of various expertise. This funnel should never resemble a Category 5 hurricane.
Results
Having content come at you fast and furiously from all directions makes it tricky to stay on top of everything, not to mention version control and deadlines that come-and-go. This can create a freelance feedback loop, which is why Sharifi seems especially grateful for another component made easier by the ClearVoice collaboration.
“Maintaining a content calendar is an another area where I’ve always struggled,” Sharifi reveals. “One of the things that makes ClearVoice so useful is how the assignment and the calendar are linked.”
This functionality has allowed Sharifi’s team to do more on the CARFAX blog than they had in the past year and has helped them “set up the right campaigns (blog categories, in [their] case) that make it easy to see what [they’re] writing about the most, or areas that [they] could focus on more.”
Ultimately, this has helped Sharifi achieve wins resulting in greater clarity, more streamlined organization and better efficiency along the way.
Comments