Pretoria - It’s a fact of life that sometimes car dealers just can’t get repairs done timeously, but now Ford South Africa is taking a proactive step to help prevent customers from being stranded for a long time.
The carmaker has announced a new “Rapid Hub” initiative that has teams of experts, from across all nine provinces, on hand to support its dealers with additional expertise.
“The Rapid Hubs are the next step in transforming the ownership experience to one that treats customers like family,” Ford South Africa says.
“This initiative takes a more proactive approach to the maintenance and repair of customer vehicles, immediately putting the resources and expertise in place should a dealer not be able to resolve a technical issue in the recommended time frame.”
Ford says each Rapid Hub is serviced by a team of on-the-ground Ford experts made up of a zone manager, field service engineer, Rapid Hub manufacturing technician, customer relationship centre, dealer sales manager, Rapid Hub leader and a hub champion.
The idea is that they work as highly motivated teams rather than isolated individuals, thereby providing every Ford dealership with a set of extra hands, help and technical expertise. The Rapid Hubs aims to unlock numerous solutions within the dealership and provide consistent communication from beginning to end.
“We want to ensure that our benchmark Next-Gen products come with an ownership experience that understands customers’ unique needs and exceeds their expectations,” said Ford SA sales and field operations manager Ashen Ramdhani.
“With Rapid Hubs, we are successfully advancing communication, unlocking processes within dealerships as well as making our response time faster and more efficient.”
The company says all Rapid Hubs have the ability to make prompt decisions by cutting across departments and geographic areas. Resources can also be leveraged and deployed between hubs in order to optimise service delivery at any given place and time.
Ultimately, the initiative aims to help dealers respond quickly to any customer’s issue with their vehicle.
Ford’s system gathers daily reports on all vehicles that are booked in for service or maintenance at Ford dealers, allowing the teams to quickly identify vehicles that aren’t repaired in the recommended time frame.
Ford says action is immediately taken to minimise vehicle downtime and ensure that the dealership has all the support it requires.