Optimum Info: Reinforcing Field Service Operations

Could you elaborate on your company’s solutions suite?

We offer an integrated cloud-based solution suite to help OEM companies in the automotive, boating, powersports, equipment, and transportation industries optimize the performance of their franchise network of dealers, distributors, and retailers.

• Our Dealer Package Management Solution helps users onboard a new dealer or make a change in the existing dealer network, get all the documentation from dealers, and manage reviews and internal decisions pertaining to dealership appointments.

• Next, our Dealer Contact Management Solution enables field managers to manage all aspects of field operations activities including reviewing dealer performance, scheduling, conducting, and recording dealer meetings as well as assigning/tracking actionable items.

• Through our Business Management Solution, we help OEMs and distributors monitor network performance, and identify opportunities to make the network financially strong and viable.

• To ensure that dealers conduct their processes as per the guidelines from the manufacturers, we have introduced an “Audit solution” which ensures that the right processes are in place and equips dealers to train their staff in representing the brand effectively.

• As we work in the universe of dealer networks, we provide a “Dealer Profile Management solution” that centralizes all the data from different solutions and platforms into one system. It allows users to manage information related to dealers and foster collaboration and communication.

• Our Facility Project Management Solution helps manufacturers manage and track the complete life cycle of a new facility project, renovations, brand image facility upgrades, greenfield, redesign, and more. The system helps track construction milestones and documentation.

What are the key differentiating factors about your business?

From my perspective what differentiates us is the culture of the company.

We try to work as partners with our customers. Having a no-change-order-policy has proven to be a huge benefit our clients.

We chose to stick with this policy for two reasons.

One is a lot of innovations we bring to our products are the results of listening to our customers. And when a customer requests anything that we see as an upgrade to the product, we will happily implement it free-of-charge so that this customer as well as all our other current and future customers can benefit from this change. Essentially, our product gets richer as we grow.

The other point is that if we were to charge the customer for these changes, they might become reluctant about requesting future changes, and any of these upgrades that could be significant would end up fading away. This has allowed us to build a lot of trust and respect in our relationships with our customers.

In the end, a lot of companies can build good software solutions, but having a culture of doing the right thing and being pro-active in helping our customers is what has allowed us to differentiate ourselves from our competition.

Could you illustrate a customer success story?

One of our automotive customers was struggling with a contact management system that had limited capabilities and was difficult to use. They had around 750 dealers in the network, and almost a hundred people, both from the sales and service side that visited the dealers every month. However, they had no proper management or oversight in place. Due to inadequate and improper documentation, they were unable to enforce policies. We listened to their needs and designed a user-friendly system for them, which proved very effective for field managers who are not computer-savvy.

Eventually, they realized that the system could help them in many different ways. We built a module that aggregated all the data without the field managers having to get the data from different sources.

With our system, they could reduce the time taken to prepare for a dealer visit from three or four hours to just 15 minutes. This has increased our system’s adoption rate in the client organization to 100 percent for the last five years.

Additionally, our solution facilitated the internal monitoring and alignment of policies, making collaboration between our client and their dealer network much easier and cohesive.

What are your plans for the future?

We aim to continue growing our presence in North America, and expand our footprint in Europe—Germany, Sweden, Belgium, Netherlands, Italy, and the UK. We will continue to reinforce and grow our products with a focus on expanding to other vertical segments like powersports, equipment and transportation manufacturer companies.