Beethoven conducts business with Nissan

Stan Beer
Wednesday, 25 January 2006 00:15

IT Industry - Deals

Australian software developer Beethoven Computer Services has completed a four-month implementation of a customer services system for car distibutor Nissan Australia.

Nissan previously operated two different systems to support its dealers and customers, Nissan is using the Beethoven solution to centralise thee services and improve the productivity of its national service department team. According to Nissan, dealer response times have been reduced from 90 minutes to 20 minutes and the production of reports takes minutes instead of months.
 
Nissan's national service department supports around 220 dealers and receives upwards of 100 customer calls each day. Until the new implementation, servicing both dealers (through the technical line whereby Nissan advises them on various procedures) and customers was phone-driven.
 
"We wanted one package which would do it all," said Bryan McNabb, service technical quality manager, Nissan Australia. "Before, we had two systems with nothing in common and they weren’t especially user-friendly. It was extremely difficult to swap between the two, with each using different keys for different functions.
 
"It was also an issue of productivity – we were completely reliant on the phone which was simply taking too much time," McNabb said. "By moving to the new system, we’ve been able to reduce the average dealer response time from 1.5 hours to 20 minutes because all the necessary information is recorded from the outset, meaning we don’t need to go back to them repeatedly to check things."
 
Prior to implementing the solution from Beethoven, Nissan had developed some systems in-house using Lotus and Outlook but these still proved time consuming as all the information still had to be transferred from the PC systems to the mainframe in order to log a job with either the dealer or the customer.
 
"The mainframe is our core hardware and we’ll never get rid of it," McNabb says. "The great thing about (Beethoven's system) Resolve, however, is that it has been integrated with our Amdahl mainframe so can talk to it directly, allowing us to alter our system as needed simply by pressing a button."
 
Nissan plans to expand its customer care system to include warranty functions. The New Zealand arm of Nissan has recently moved its customer and dealer operations to the new system and is running the system from the Melbourne server.