TruVideo Heads Into New Verticals and Helps Sustain This Toyota Forklift Dealer’s Business During the COVID Shutdown.
Southern Material Handling Company is Seeing Now a 98% Upsell Rate in Their Repair Orders
The Story
An accidental text during the grim start of Covid ended up being a huge bright spot for Toyota Forklift Dealership, Southern Material Handling Company and TruVideo alike. In Tulsa, Oklahoma during the beginning of Covid when all non-essential business was shutting down and directly impacting the material handling business, Southern Material Handling Company remained open to service the essential businesses. They saw a significant drop in overall business as safety guidelines precautioned against in-person service calls. Steve Belmear, VP General Manager, was sitting in his office when one of his salespeople walked in and showed him a text that was accidentally sent from a local Nissan Automobile dealership. The text was a video using the TruVideo platform of a salesperson explaining a vehicle. After watching the TruVideo, he realized that this might just be the solution they needed during this time. They found their way to TruVideo and Michaela, the team member dedicated to bringing TruVideo into new industries.
TruService allows customers to see and understand the results of their service inspection. With the TruService platform, service departments can send personalized videos to clients that show their vehicle’s maintenance and repair needs right to their phone. Customers can watch it at their leisure, process the details, and share it with a friend or confidant. Designed for the transportation industry, this digital platform offers: streamlined service inspections, estimates, internal chat, approvals, and payments all by text, today’s preferred method of communication. By finally eliminating the barriers to transparency, shops that use TruVideo improve the entire customer experience and see a 30% increase in customer pay dollars. Just one service visit creates trust that used to take years to earn.
TruEstimate is a simple, easy-to-use tool that allows service departments to build and send professional digital quotes. Customers can easily accept recommendations directly from their phone, accelerating response time and reducing technician wait time. Estimates can be populated from a standard, dealer-specific library of items that include labor op codes, descriptions, default pricing or items can be created on the fly as needed. Combined with video, TruEstimate increases upsold work and empowers the customer to make an informed decision. In addition, any declined recommendations flow into reminders that can be sent to customers as a follow-up.
Results
After installing TruVideo in April 2020, Southern Material Handling Company not only kept their business going, but they started seeing a surprising number of repair orders getting approved, including a huge increase in upsells.
in upsold repairs through the TruVideo platform using TruEstimate.
%
upsell rate through TruVideo
videos sent to customers have an average of 2 times shared by the customer.
Client Response
“TruVideo was a lifesaver. Honestly, you kept people employed here, no joke. In material handling, the analogy is that everything consumers touch, we move multiple times. As with all equipment, there are always going to be breakdowns that require repairs, as well as preventative maintenance with the goal of reducing downtime. Many times, the person writing the check only sees an expensive invoice. That’s the beauty of TruVideo, is bringing that to light and getting more transparency, which gives us more support as being the trusted material handling experts that we are. The majority of our customers trust the guy that is actually working on their vehicles over the person that writes up their ROs. With TruVideo, the customer gets to see first hand what needs to be done.”
Steve Belmear
VP General Manager
Southern Material Handling Company
Looking Forward
Steve looks to implement other TruVideo products to help streamline their operations even further. Their current internal communication involves creating email chains and referencing RO numbers sent to various departments. With TruChat a communication channel would be created with the RO and then easily shared to other departments, saving time and money.
