Goodyear News

Come power failures, electric storms or strikes, there will always be a trained representative on hand at the Goodyear group’s new Customer Service Centre to help keep customers safely on the road.

According to Goodyear Supply Chain Director Ettienne de Vries, that’s a “24/7/365 guarantee!” “Whether that customer is a truck driver, desperate for roadside assistance at midnight because he needs to make his dawn delivery deadline, or a tyre dealer in urgent need of specific products for his customer, our team’s mission is to be their helping hand at any time, day or night,” he explained. “It’s a mission in line with Goodyear’s policy of ‘Safety together’ and our global drive to be first with our customers. Our service is part of this partnership promise.”

The new, integrated Goodyear Customer Service Centre took its first call on 7 January 2011. In essence, the service provides all customers – dealers, sales force, fleet controllers and end users –with a single communication point with the large organisation. Previously spread between separate centres in Gauteng and Uitenhage, the 21 call representatives are now based on site at Goodyear’s Uitenhage manufacturing plant.

“By carefully consolidating and integrating the Goodyear, Trentyre Roadside Assistance and 4Fleet (account handling) customer call centres, the group now shares crucial support structures and technology to ensure the service is never interrupted and customers never inconvenienced,” said De Vries. “The move has synergised the best of people, technology and processes to offer all our customers an even higher level of service excellence.”

The centralised facility is engineered to handle:

· Dealer support, including all aspects of sales such as ordering and product availability.

· Sales force support, including price changes, bulk order placements and sales reports.

· Trentyre’s non-stop Roadside Assistance, which facilitates the repair or replacement of tyres through the national Trentyre dealer and affiliate footprint.

· Trentyre account administration, to ensure effective inter-branch transfers, invoicing and general enquiries.

· 4Fleet Account Administration, which supports fleets with invoicing and general enquiries.

· Customer liaison, including a complaints support line for all warehouse and delivery related concerns.

Heading the call centre operation is Group Customer Service Manager, Ardiela Savahl, supported by Operations Manager Vaughn Herbert. A calm, direct woman with vast experience, Savahl exudes an almost motherly air about her team and nurtures their wellbeing under the demanding shift schedule to ensure they stay motivated, dynamic and attentive for customers.

“The excellent team spirit here encourages a high level of support and accountability amongst the agents. Our top achiever, Roxanne Bosman, handles around 2000 calls per month. This job requires a special sort of person: tenacious, energised and, of course, customer focused.

“Fleets, in particular, experience an element of risk on the road and there is big money at stake, so customers are understandably feeling the pressure. Our job provides the opportunity to turn a potentially negative experience around, actually build on brand loyalty for the Goodyear group and improve sales.

“In fact, we like to believe we are an extension of the sales team. Our agents benefit from continuous training and development. They are well informed about products, business processes and systems. Every call is recorded and randomly checked by management to track response quality and end user customer experience. We also receive valuable feedback on a quarterly basis from an independent research company that surveys our customers so we can track their perceptions and continually improve on our service levels.”

In addition to the Goodyear group centre, a dedicated Export Division call centre assists the group’s African customers stretching from South African borders right up to the equator.

“Theirs is predominantly a sales administration function, so these agents are knowledgeable about the systems within each country and are able to establish positive relationships with these customers.”

In fact, the call centre covers such a wide area of the group’s service offering that it even provides a useful background for new employees, particularly those in sales. De Vries said, “all graduates-in-training spend four months in the call centre to help them get a grip on the vast range of products and processes of Goodyear.”