How did it do it? Simon Sharwood investigates the application driving Nissan’s customer success.
Bryan McNabb is not an IT person. “I’ve got 20-something years experience fixing cars,” says Nissan Australia’s service technical quality manager. “IT is not what I do.”
He might not be an IT expert but in his role of ensuring the professional delivery of vehicle service he did understand that Nissan’s approach to customer management left a lot to be desired.
Competitive pressures in the automotive industries over the last few years has caused warranties on new vehicles to be extended to the point where five years is now standard. For a manufacturer such as Nissan, this extended warranty time represents the potential for a very long and expensive tail of claims from owners and dealers alike. Part of McNabb’s job is ensuring the company’s 220 dealers provide excellent service on Nissan vehicles, while actively managing the process to stop costs escalating.
According to McNabb, these challenges experienced by the company through the early years of “the noughties” highlighted the shortcomings of Nissan’s customer service software.
“We operated two bespoke applications. One was a [customer relationship management] CRM system that tracked vehicle owners’ interactions, the other was a system we call Techline that tracks requests from dealers,” McNabb explains.
The CRM application, designed specifically for Nissan, was used to manage relationships with vehicle owners.
The other application, Techline, which was also designed by Nissan, logged inquiries from dealers seeking technical assistance when repairing customers’ vehicles. Techline was used by McNabb’s team to resolve dealers’ issues by creating a “case” for each query that was kept open until its resolution and then stored for later reference.
Both the CRM and Techline applications ran on a mainframe but were discrete and did not interoperate—records about customers whose cars generated Techline inquiries were manually updated. “We knew it was crazy having two systems,” says McNabb.
The torturous processes required to operate Techline only made matters worse, says McNabb. “Dealers would call in and leave us their dealer code. We would call them back, log the contact in Techline to report if the person we needed to speak with was there or not. There was a lot of double entry involved. It was a productivity issue because we were completely reliant on the phone which was simply taking too much time,” he says.
Complicating matters further was the volume of calls Techline had to handle. Nissan receives about 40 enquiries daily from dealers and resolving them can often take more than a day. With hundreds of open queries sometimes stored in the mainframe, resolution could at times come down to information simply remembered by McNabb’s staff members—an unreliable and ad
hoc arrangement.
McNabb also knew these systems were not sophisticated enough to handle the fast pace of industry change. “There are a lot of technological changes in cars,” he says. “When we release a new model we do training on it but it takes each dealer time to build up its own knowledge base.”
According to McNabb, the best way to contain costs is to capture each dealer’s experience in a repository so that once a solution to an issue had been found it could be communicated to others.
“We needed to capture dealers’ experiences to keep stakeholders informed but we struggled to do it with the old applications,” he says.
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