How Toyota Material Handling decreases handling time and focusses on delivering customer delight

Toyota Material Handling sells and rents out internal transport solutions, such as forklifts and pallet trucks. In order to offer a complete customer experience, they also have their own service team. This team consists of no less than 180 mechanics throughout the Netherlands, who are solving issues and performing maintenance every day.

The customer support team at Toyota Material Handling gets about 125,000 service requests every year and needs to be in constant contact with the mechanics. In order to keep communication as efficient as possible, they use Trengo.

The challenge: decreasing handling time, to service customers better

Toyota Material Handling aims to be the best at offering high-quality service. Fast communication and problem-solving are key in order to achieve this, making it necessary for the support team and mechanics to be in close contact throughout the day.

"Before we started using Trengo, we used to communicate with our mechanics via phone. This created a high workload for our support teams and the processes in the field were often slowed down because of this," says Martijn Kruijning, team lead support. "That's why we started to investigate how we can lower the number of daily phone calls and lower the workload in the process."

Delivering consistent quality, from any location

As if that wasn't challenging enough, Martijn's team was forced to start working from home in march because of COVID-19. "We sporadically come to the office, but that's completely voluntary. We are looking into the possibility to work from the office more regularly, but don't expect to leave our home offices any time soon."

Martijn's team had to start communicating more efficiently while working from home.

The solution: save time through automation

Toyota wanted to decrease their handling time, to save more time actually servicing customers. So at the start of 2020, Toyota Material Handling switched from calling to WhatsApp to communicate with its mechanics. Now teams can easily work together, because this channel allows them to communicate faster.

Besides that, now all work from the same platform, and collaborate within the inbox by for instance @tagging each other.

"Using Trengo saves us time that we can use to offer high-quality service for our customers."

"Phone conversations simply tend eat away at your time," says Iva Serghini, part of the support team. "A lot of those calls turn into small talk, which can become very time-consuming. That just doesn't happen via WhatsApp. You can also assign WhatsApp conversations to the right employee with the push of a button. Using Trengo saves the entire team a lot of time that we can use to offer even better service for our customers."

The result: fast and consistent quality service

1. Faster and efficient collaboration

Toyota Material Handling's support & and service team both work faster and more efficiently than they did before.

"Before we started using Trengo, we had about 200 phone conversations a day, now that's down to about 100 a day. The handling time of all WhatsApp conversations via Trengo has decreased from an hour to half an hour on average since the beginning of this year. You can easily view these statistics in Trengo. We like to show these statistics to our mechanics so that they also understand how well communicating via Trengo is working for us."

2. Time-saved to spend on customer delight

But this is not just about speed. Toyota saw their team's workload decrease drastically when it came to admin, and recurring tasks. Leaving them more time to service and delight customers.

"The handling time of all the conversations with mechanics has decreased by 50%."

3. Consistent service delivery, no matter the location

Even the COVID-19 measures can't change that. "Both our customers and our mechanics tell us that they haven't noticed that the entire team is now working from their home office," says Martijn.