Quality customer service is the gateway to long-term relationships. By understanding your consumer base, delivering on or exceeding their expectations and proactively identifying opportunities for improvement, your business can establish a connection with customers that can stand the test of time.
by Jamie Brooks, Phocas Ltd.
Business Intelligence (BI) software enables automotive manufacturers, suppliers and distributors to better assess key customer service metrics and use these insights to improve customer retention. Here are three ways a BI tool can improve your organization’s customer service efforts:
1. Faster Identification of Key Trends and Stats
Decision makers are continuously seeking ways to assess key performance indicators (KPIs) across functions. If you are a Contact Center Manager or are responsible for service delivery, being able to assess data such as the average handling time, average waiting time and first touch resolution across different service channels is crucial. Your BI tool should include dashboards that allow you to explore areas, which require a greater analysis. You want your users to have an experience that is simple and intuitive. Decision makers and managers should be able to look at the data and identify trends that have an impact on daily operations and connect those results to customer interactions. Based on the information you collect, you can improve forecasting, implement customer service tactics that work and eliminate those that have negative outcomes.
Since implementing a BI system at LED Autolamps, a supplier of vehicle lighting systems, the company has multiple members tracking product sales and specifically analyzing daily sales by part number. The software contributed to a 20% increase in turnover for the business in the first few months. Management is now able to instantly see what customers are buying what products and more importantly, what they’re not buying. This intelligence helps salespeople to take advantage of sales opportunities, as well as identify customer issues before they become challenges to the business.
2. Deeper Analysis
Your BI tool should allow you to drill down into your customer service data and analyze the feedback. What aspects of your customer service platform are working? Which elements are leading to undesirable outcomes? BI can help you better measure industry sentiment, geographic or product-based trends and identify areas where feedback levels could be improved. Richer analysis – seeing how a service request is addressed throughout its lifecycle – lets you better pinpoint the customer service areas in your business that require attention.
TT Automotive is one of just 32 authorized Bosch Diesel Centers in the UK. The company has built a customer base of over 20,000 independent garages, diesel workshops, motor factors, electrical specialists, and fleet companies. TT Automotive uses its BI system every day to understand in detail what is and isn’t selling. The data is broken out into product ranges, groups, specific parts or by customers in geographic areas, line of business or rep code. All the data is updated daily and allows the company to establish budgets against anything, set up trading days, and develop custom reports. The system’s custom dashboards provide a complete visual health check on the business, as well as customer relationships.
3. Greater Customer Satisfaction
You provide your customers with products, so you want to gauge how satisfied they are with your ordering and fulfillment processes. With your collected data, your BI tool should allow you to quickly and simply measure fulfillment rates and delivery times. How fast are orders being fulfilled? Are deliveries being made on time? If not, why? How likely are your customers to purchase from you again? BI enables you to dig into the numbers so you can clearly assess this information and then implement strategies to increase satisfaction.
CoolDrive Distribution, a supplier of parts and accessories to the automotive industry, has 60,000 products across its a distribution center and 20 warehouses. They also have 40 reps on the road with local and remote customers to satisfy. The biggest challenge for them prior to deploying BI software was the immediacy of the product request. In automotive repair, companies must have the right product in the right place to meet demand.
CoolDrive wanted to better understand its customer relationships so it could maximize inventory investment. After implementing a BI solution, the company was able to see how individual products, stock orders, stock-on-hand, sales reps and locations were performing across their 20 warehouses. BI allows the company to more effectively manage inventory to ensure it can meet customer demand.
With the right BI software, you can access intuitive analytical capabilities that allow your team members to assess information that leads to greater customer satisfaction. These capabilities include:
- Quickly drilling down into data
- Assessing fulfillment rates and delivery times (DIFOT) while gauging customer appreciation and satisfaction
- Analyzing trends to improve forecasting
- Evaluating and exploring cross-functional statistics and more!
Your company’s customer service efforts require a quality BI tool to maximize outcomes, and the right solution can help you outpace your competitors.
