Nissan South Africa's use of Heat, the service management application from FrontRange Solutions, has enabled it to improve customer service and reduce the cost of business by accurately tracking and escalating customer queries.
"Heat enables us to not only track every contact we've had with an owner or driver of a Nissan vehicle, but also every technical issue related to the vehicle concerned," says Nissan South Africa Senior Manager, Customer Care, Jacques Labotsky. "So, our call centre agents are able to have informed discussions with the drivers or owners, giving them the confidence that we know what we're doing and are doing our best for them. The consultants are also able to intelligently direct the corrective action taken either by our technical division or our dealers.
"In other words, by getting a 360-degree view of our customers and their vehicles; we're able to provide a faster, more focused, more efficient service - and, in the process, cut the cost of doing business.
"Every vehicle repair or test for which we have to provide a courtesy car, for instance, is a direct cost to the business. So the shorter the time spent by the vehicle in the workshop, the more money we save. By enabling us to run our business better, Heat saves us that money as well as helping us build customer loyalty.
"Also, our previous system did not give us specific detail about customer concerns. It would simply tell us, for instance, that a customer had complained about bad service from a dealer and we didn't know whether that meant a dealer was not returning calls or a vehicle had not been correctly repaired. With Heat, we can be extremely precise about what the issues are and can therefore ensure the dealer takes the necessary corrective action. And that, in turn, ensures a high level of consistency in the image conveyed by our dealers to the public."
Heat is used by 28 people in two different sections of Nissan's Customer Care Division - the Customer Support Centre, which interacts mainly with customers, and the Field Product Support Department, which interacts with dealers and workshops on technical issues.
"The two sections work off the same Heat database, but their screens are different in terms of the details they are required to collect, analyse and report on," Labotsky says. "That way we can get integrated daily management reports that tell us what our customers' experience is of the Nissan brand while still being able to handle individual customer calls in very specific detail."
According to Labotsky, Nissan South Africa chose Heat from among a number of competitor products because of its superior flexibility - allowing them to easily adapt the application themselves to meet the changing demands of the business in response to market dynamics.
"For us, Heat is a live system in that we can add or take away functionality or data immediately as we adapt to industry trends without having to call on specialist, expensive consultancy or systems integration services. Our two internal system administrators can make all the changes we need."
FrontRange Solutions (SA) general manager for Africa, Paul Bornhutter, says Heat's flexibility results from the product being process rather than feature and function based. "Software features tend to age very quickly as new operating and device technologies evolve.
"Business processes, on the other hand, may change in content from time to time, but very rarely in terms of structure or methodology. So, once you have them up-and-running, you need change the solution only slightly to accommodate content changes. That means you can keep system maintenance and management costs to an absolute minimum while you continuously improve the performance of the business. That's a pretty good deal, all around."
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