With the help of constructive customer feedback, FNW-Pacific lead a communication focus group with key service department stakeholders, to identify and implement processes improvements to better serve customers.
For Immediate Release
March 13th, 2019 – Pacific, WA – As the dealership family’s largest service volume location, Freightliner Northwest Pacific has had it’s share of challenges with managing the magnitude of service business handled by the shop. Inspired by feedback from customer surveys and direct conversations with some of the company’s top customers, a Continuous Improvement (CI) event was developed and the new processes achieved by the event have been implemented.
The Service Communication CI Event goals were to enhance customer communication processes, better define service department job roles as well as outline workflow and responsibilities to reduce wasted time and achieve better customer satisfaction. The team named their project “Chaos Control” and was made up of a well-rounded team of service individuals as well as resources from IT and expert dealer family consultants.
By working through 32 different pain points, identifying where the team was overloaded and where there was opportunity to shift workload, the team was able to move away from a reactive approach to proactive customer communication. Throughout several brainstorming sessions they identified realistic improvements, utilized a value graph to focus and improve workload, and set their firm implementation deadline.
The Service Communication CI Event produced 23 action items, created standardized process documents, defined clear roles and responsibilities which were then communicated and trained across the service staff. The action items included assigning customers to staff for daily updates, phone tree improvements to prevent missed calls, voicemail assignments for prompt follow up and the group trained upon and implemented a shared email box to prevent duplicate work and missing responses.
Process improvements achieved by the Service Communication CI Event will be continuously audited through customer surveys, call logging, daily customer update monitoring and voicemail counts and will benefit customers doing business with the Pacific, WA service department going forward. Customers should expect faster email response times and much improved, proactive communication.
Our service team is focused on reducing downtime and giving our customers a great experience. In the course of processing hundreds of repair jobs a week, reliable tools and processes are needed to ensure we are delivering on customer expectations. Those that directly participated in this CI event were dedicated to making the communication improvements needed to better care for our customers long term. – Dan Greenwood, Operations Director
Freightliner Northwest is committed to Elite Support and Continuous Improvement. Click here for more information about Elite Support. Do you have feedback for us? We value your experience and invite you to click here to submit a customer satisfaction survey.
About Gordon Truck Centers, Inc.
Built upon over 30 years of helping customer satisfy their transportation needs, Gordon Truck Centers, Inc. is an expanded network of dealerships doing business as Freightliner Northwest, Western Star Northwest, and Freightliner of Hawaii. The Dealership Family has 12 locations throughout Washington, Oregon and Hawaii located off nearly every major highway. As a full-service Freightliner, Western Star, Fuso, Wilson Trailer, Reitnouer Aluminum Trailer dealership family, GTC can sell, finance, insure and service commercial trucks for medium and heavy-duty applications.