About the client
The client is a globally renowned Japanese commercial vehicle and diesel engine manufacturing firm with distribution across more than 100 countries. Their determined focus on ensuring high-quality and effective servicing for long-term vehicle use has helped them capture 82% of the US market share in the low cab segment. This has been further made possible because of their sustained relationship with about 300 dealers across the country. Since beginning overseas operations in 1949, the client has become the preferred brand for numerous customers, making them an industry leader in 37 countries, across its product portfolio.
Challenge
The client faced several challenges:
- Maintaining effective communication and collaboration with its dealers, by ensuring optimum helpdesk support for the dealer B2B portal
- Delivering advanced technical support for the dealer body in utilizing the B2B portal to conduct business with the corporate office
- Provide responsive helpdesk support covering multiple U.S., Canada, and Central American time zones
- Facilitate and escalate major incident/outage virtual meetings to engage multiple technical teams to expedite problem resolution
- Providing dealership employees with a professional IT helpdesk as an extension of the client’s corporate brand
Helpdesk Support for the Dealer Portal
The client relies on a network of independent dealerships across the US to drive sales and revenue. Therefore, ease of communication and collaboration with the dealers, as well as building trusting relationships, is key to the client’s continued success in the US.
In order to enable easy collaboration, the client leverages a dealer portal that acts as a one-stop solution platform and that arms the dealers with functions to facilitate many operational services such as selling vehicles, ordering parts, and processing warranty claims.
Our helpdesk support was key to the success of the portal due to the following reasons:
- The dealers’ biggest demand from the client was responsive and effective technical support, allowing the dealers to focus on their core competencies, namely selling vehicles, ordering parts, locating vehicles, submitting financial statements, processing claims and much more.
- Ensuring good helpdesk support to help the dealers quickly solve any portal-related issues or get their business questions answered was the best way for the client to build a trusted relationship with its dealer network.
IT Helpdesk for Employees
The client has around 400 employees across multiple entities in the US that service different operations including R&D, parts distribution, assembly, marketing, and sales. A comprehensive IT infrastructure is available to the different teams to assist in their deliverables.
Given the criticality of the different technology solutions in their overall operations, the client recognized that they required a robust IT helpdesk to maintain a high level of operational efficiency. The challenge was to find the right outsourced partner who could offer expert IT helpdesk support.
Our Approach and Solution
Understanding the Client’s Needs
The client had a very clear and mission-critical requirement from their IT support desk - a team of professionals who thoroughly understood the dealer portal and could quickly troubleshoot issues faced by the dealers. The client also required the outsourced IT support staff to build a strong relationship with the dealers to ensure trust between the parties
In addition, the client was seeking a partner with help desk agents skilled in understanding its corporate culture, values, platforms, systems, products, and environment. Calance became an extension of the client’s IT organization, enabling a strong level of solutions expertise and strong customer service experience with each dealer interaction.
“Supporting our dealers is one of the highest priorities. Because we operate in a B2B environment, relationships with our dealers are very important to us. So having someone on the service desk that has that relationship with dealership employees is crucial.”
- Manager, Client’s IT TeamThe Calance approach involved gaining a strong understanding of the client’s dealer portal and associated IT infrastructure, combined with a focus on understanding the relationship between the client and the dealers. The focus was on delivering through:
Dealer Support Infrastructure
The outsourced helpdesk team for the dealer portal delivered support in many ways: they helped dealers get enrolled onto the portal, solved their queries, and helped the dealership employees learn how to use the portal for their respective business and operational requirements.
IT Helpdesk Support
The Calance team also provided IT helpdesk support to the field staff and employees of the client. The support functions included:
- Telecom support, in the form of PBX support at all locations
- Network support, especially in situations of network outages or hardware issues that could hinder access to any of the client’s portals
- Desktop/laptop support with extensive knowledge of devices, server, and network
- SAP BASIS, Process Integration and Process Orchestration support to ensure secure and effective file sharing with relevant vendors and partners
- Server support, to enable easy access, as well as maintenance and upgrades
Timely Performance Tracking and Reporting
The Calance team put in place a system to track incoming emails and calls from the client’s employees and dealers to measure the performance of the outsourced IT support team.
Additionally, Calance ran a recurring caller survey to continually measure service quality and provided comprehensive survey analytics to the client. Inferences from these reports powered efforts to improve support delivery.
Results
Expert Knowledge, Increased Coverage, Timely Resolutions
IT help desk outsourcing has consistently delivered high-quality support that ensured:
- 97% calls answered within 30 seconds
- 93% first call resolution for dealer helpdesk
- Less than 3% call abandonment rate
“Calance shines in providing support for the dealer portal and the service desk team’s knowledge of the portal is also very high.”
- Manager, Client's IT Team
Building Trust with Quality IT Support
The Calance team has a very low employee turnover. Having such a stable support team has been key to building long-term connections with the client’s dealers and employees. This established our teams as a highly available, responsive and dependable outsourced helpdesk that in turn developed implicit trust with the client’s employees and dealers.
“There are people who have been on the service desk for a very long time and those people have created relationships with our dealer employees and our staff. When someone calls in, they hear a familiar voice and there is a camaraderie between the dealership and the support staff. So the support turns out better. And it is important to have this relationship because it creates trust, which is very valuable.”
- Manager, Client’s IT Team
High Dealer Satisfaction Driving Client’s Growth
- Calance team’s alignment with the client’s culture makes the dealers perceive them as the client's employees, thus contributing to high trust.
- The dealer portal, along with the expert support provided by the staff, has been instrumental in helping the client repeatedly rank at the top of a dealer satisfaction survey run yearly by the American Truck Dealers.
“The dealers don't know that the Calance staff are not our employees. When they call in, they think they are calling us.”
- Manager, Client’s IT Team
Looking for an outsourced team to build a high-performance IT helpdesk? Calance teams can help assess your helpdesk needs and get that conversation started.
