Company: BRP
Entry submitted by: Jasmin Boudreau (Jasmin) Community Manager
Community: BRP Community (https://community.bossweb.brp.com), a private B2B community
Lithy category: The Organization Game Changer
BRP: Who we are, what we do and what’s our story!
BRP is the world leader in the design, manufacturing, distribution and marketing of motorized recreational vehicles and power sports engines. BRP products are distributed in over 100 countries by more than 3,500 dealers and distributors.
What makes your heart race? How often to you take the time to smile ear to ear and share good time with your family
We push ourselves for it. We come together to earn it. We try and try and try again to reach that prize. It's our motivation, our inspiration to move forward. It's the reason why we stand back up every time we fall. What are we talking about?
We are the company that invented the snowmobile and we`ve built 3,000,000 sleds to date!!!!!
We are not bringing you to the water; we are the company that brings the water to YOU.
We believe in a world where everyone can experience the exhilaration of the open road.
The riders. The ultimate rush. The Can-AM off-road thrills are never-ending.
LIVING THE LIFESTYLE. SHARING THE PASSION.
Take a deeper look at our culture in this short but powerful video: BRP - The history is made of stories
Now that you have a better understanding of who we are and what we do, you will better understand why we did our transformation and the pressure was high. We will also show you all of the reasons that explain why we deserve this award.
The Organization Game Changer
The BRP Community links all of the BRP dealerships and BRP together across the world to share advice, technical expertise and to connect in a completely different way. This community is the ONLY one in the power sports industry.
Our Community is a private Business to Business community and has been active since February 2012. We are still relatively young but have shown a tremendous growth and success since our go-live.
For years our North America after-sales support department have supported our dealer network by picking up the phone and answering questions. Considering our large dealer network, our continual growth of business, the complexity of vehicles and the large call volumes, we needed to change our methods of supporting our dealers.
Combined with the complexity of questions, the increasing volume of requests, the dealer survey results and the on-going frustration of not being able to provide more added–value in our customer lives, we decided it was time to change. We needed to look at the service experience and the structure of our after-sales department to address the challenges our network was facing in their day to day and meet their expectations of our company.
We decided to change our call center to a contact center by using new technologies to move towards a Dealer service transformation (DST).
2013 was the year of transformation for our BRP North-American after-sales service team and we changed the way we interacted with our dealers.
The changes took place with 4 key pillars
1) Leveraging our Knowledge center
2) Increasing the community usage and integrating it in our dealer`s day to day operations
3) Introduction of webcases to receive questions from our dealers
4) Changing the team structure to support our dealers by Regional Teams accessible via multiple channels instead of reaching departments and silos.
What does this mean to you, to us, to our customers?
We want to make sure our customer’s vehicles are fixed right the first time and that our customers never lose a ride!
Where Lithium does comes into play against our business goals?
The BRP Community powered by Lithium is a critical asset in our transformation.
“We cannot become what we want to be by remaining what we are!”
At this point, we are no longer a call center but rather a complete hands-on contact center.
Whenever a Dealer in service is looking for BRP information the 4 steps we ask them to take are the following:
1- First look on the Knowledge Center.
Dealers can now type a VIN (vehicle identification number or serial number) or use the keyword box to search hundreds of articles and technical information related to the unit in their service bay. They now have access to a VIN centric tool simplifying the amount of time and effort to have the information right away. They now have access to the best knowledge information from our top technicians 24/7 without calling in.
Our networking is consulting over 43 000 technical articles per year.
2. Go to Community and use the search tool for the network to provide support.
Our dealers can now follow BRP in this live environment and be informed on a daily basis on all parts, technical, and warranty related questions or any other after-sales service topics within this one stop shop. It’s also allowing them to access other techs around the globe. It’s given the chance for dealers to leverage the thousands of years of experience with BRP vehicles where before they were limited to their facility.
In the last 3 months, during our biggest Ski-doo season, we saw amazing numbers on our Community. Over 865 000 pages were viewed by 41 000 visitors. Remember, we are in a B2B environment so we are limited in the amount of users we can have and we need to keep them coming.
Again, this is not a typical community with customers coming in for their own personal interests. These are technicians and service managers that are taking time from their typical day to day activities to go in an environment that isn’t truly natural to them. Considering these users are not computer enthusiast, they could have felt that an online community was a waste of time and money but this was not the case as we see them coming back over and over again. This demonstrates our true success.
In the event they didn't find they were looking for, the step 3 comes into play.
3. Dealers can also submit a Webcase to get support from our Regional Teams.
We now have an online webcase system that allows for dealers to reach us whenever they feel the need to send inquires. We can prioritize their requests and within the same dedicated amount of time we will answer them. No more wait times on the phone, nor do they need to adjust their needs with our schedule.
We can provide a direct answer through the webcase and point them in the direction of the Knowledge Center or Community when necessary.
4. The Contact Center:
For more complex or pressing issues, the BRP phone service also supported by our Regional Team is also available for our dealers. We receive hundreds and hundreds phone calls from our network.
Because of our Knowledge Center, Community and Webcase tool dealers can now use the time to phone us in order to discuss more complex issues without being rushed or having to wait on hold for long periods of time.
Why is BRP the ideal candidate for this award?
We are the only manufacturer in the entire power sport industry with a dealer community (B2B) in place. This is a tremendous achievement for our organization to have such innovation and success while being able to have our dealer network support this change.
The dealers, mostly multi-brands, are recognizing the power and benefits of our approach. It was a very big challenge for BRP to have them change their habits of going from phone to using our online community. We`ve heard so many times at the beginning of this transformation: “I don’t want my tech to lose time on the internet.” Or “I’m paying him to wrench, not to push keys on a keyboard” and the typical “Why would I spend time using your tool if I can just call you?”
Today we are no longer getting these comments, we are simply getting accolades and dealers will tell you that they cannot imagine working without these tools.
We are a Canadian company using technologies to outperform larger American or international competitors. It’s not an unfair battle; it’s a question of innovation, creativity and passion.
One of the ways to define our culture and company comes from this short video:
The ultimate power sport experience - BRP the power to the go!
The partnership, a similar culture and passion and the will to change
The partnership between Lithium and BRP becomes a natural fit for our transformation but also falls within our culture of passion and willingness to do more for our customers and to strive in being the best at what we do.
The BRP community helps in so many ways:
Increasing shop efficiency and faster turnaround time: It’s much easier for our dealers to get answers to fix units of customers: The service is never closed at BRP since the community connects the planet together.
Securing vehicles that are fixed right the first time It’s allowing dealers to find the right information in minimal time and preventing customers to have to bring back the vehicle due to an improper fix.
Better CSI scores and greater chances of not losing a week-end of fun: It’s helping dealers increasing the customer satisfaction by increasing technician’s knowledge and skills.
Service experience and greater connection between BRP and the dealer network: It’s allowing BRP to secure strategic initiatives to help secure MOTs (Moment of truth). The service MOT is one of the key pillars for our customer satisfaction.
Access to our partners in ways we never seen before: It’s allowing BRP to receive instant feed-back from our network in a real time environment and benefit from a continuous communication stream.
Remove pressure on our Contact center: The users and the MVPs in the community are allowing us to focus on more complex cases and offer added-value where it counts while the rest of the network is supporting each other by deflecting request to us and allowing dealers to have answers outside our business hours.
The question you have: Yes, that's all nice but what does it mean in numbers?
Within our closed environment where we operate with a limited amount of dealers and distributors, our metrics are not the same as the typical B2C ou P2P. For others, our metrics may look marginal but for us, and based on Lithium internal benchmark, we know we have outstanding results and a fantastic story to share. History is made of stories; our story can also be understood with numbers.
We have seen incredible growth in 2013. In the last 12 months
- Overall posts: 41 000 and 80% growth
- Logins: 1 344 000 and 134% growth
- User sessions: 1 200 000 and 252% growth
- Accepted solutions: 3 100 and 77% growth
- Searches: 100 000 and 51% growth
Combining theses metrics to some of the previous numbers on the community we`ve shared at the beginning of this submission, you can see our dealer support transformation unfolding right before your eyes.
We truly believe that The Organization Game Changer award is meant for us.
- We have changed the communication method used by a thousand dealers after decades of habits;
- We were able to completely remodel and reshape our internal departments to remove silos;
- We leveraged new technologies to everyone’s benefit;
- We now have put the customer at the center of the operations.
More importantly, all of this transformation wasn’t possible if we didn’t have a strong community, powered by Lithium, supporting our goal and vision.
What are our next challenges? We will find new creative ways to push these innovations and support mechanism to uncharted territories and show our competition, within our industry, that we are true leaders. Everywhere & every time we put our mind, passion and efforts in our service and in our products is one more step closer towards providing our customers the ultimate experience.
You don’t believe it? If we did this, nothing can stop us. Just Watch us!
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Please see the following deck to better understand the overall transformation that took place in 2013 in our NA after-sales department:
