The Customer
Mathieu Kerckhofs Trailers is the exclusive distributor of Ifor Williams Trailers in Belgium. Ifor Williams Trailers is Britain’s leading trailer manufacturer with a long-standing reputation for producing reliable and robust trailers.
In 1991 Mathieu Kerckhofs started by purchasing a sheep trailer. More than 22 years later, the importer of Ifor Williams welcomes customers from a very wide range: horse trailers, trailers for passenger cars/construction companies, livestock trailers, closed trailers, …
In addition to providing the market with high quality trailers, Mathieu Kerckhhofs Tralues also values an impeccable after-sales service.
The Challenge
The company was faced with a high administrative workload related to various aspects of after-sales service. For example, each of the more than thousand repair and maintenance activities per year require extensive communication with customers to ensure that they don’t forget their appointment.
Regular service appointments are critical for safety and compliance. In order to ensure that customers do not forget to schedule their appointment on time, pro-active reminders need to be sent to customers based on the expiry date of their current technical inspection.
The Solution
Mathieu Kerckhofs Trailers works together with dot to dot waarmakers, an advisory and consultancy company specialized in helping medium-sized and small companies with their organizational growth. Due to the nature of the repetitive processes, dot to dot advised Mathieu Kerckhofs Trailers to partner with robonext to automate these repetitive administrative processes.
By using Microsoft Power Automate, several software robots have been built to take over the administrative workload. One software robot starts from the Outlook calendars with scheduled repair and maintenance appointments and creates and sends reminder emails to Mathieu Kerckhofs Trailers customers at fixed times.
Another robot first looks in Mathieu Kerckhofs Trailers’ Venice ERP system for which trailers the inspection will expire and based on this data, the robot proactively sends reminders to customers to ensure that they book their appointment on time.
The Results
Thanks to the automations built by robonext, the administative workload has been diminished which led to an increased efficiency of internal operations. On top, the possibilities to inform and remind customers pro-actively, led to an improved quality of their services for customers.
In the words of Sofie Pellens, dot to dot: “The robot automation not only supports Mathieu Kerckhofs Trailers with the administrative workload, it also contributes to achieving their business goals: a higher quality for customers on after-sales service, as well as an increased turnover for this business unit.”
