BE FORWARD is one of the leading companies in the used car e-commerce industry, and exports used cars to more than 200 countries. With sales reaching about 15,000 vehicles per month, BE FORWARD decided to establish a partnership with E-guardian in order to respond quickly to emails and phone calls from countries in different time zones. Here is the interview. We learned about how the new services were introduced and their outcomes from Ms. Aya Hashimoto, a manager of sales operations for the African region.
Background Leading up to the Partnership
Proposal skills and outside-the-box flexibility are the deciding factors.
- Our service operations department deals with general inquiries, price negotiations, and orders through email and phone calls from over 200 countries, mainly in the African region. However, one of our biggest problems is the time difference between Japan and other countries. Since our business hours are from 9am to 7pm (JST), we could not respond to emails received around closing time, and we had no choice but to make customers wait for our replies until the following day. Actually, about 1,000 emails arrive between closing time and opening time, and 50 employees handle them starting from 9am. Sometimes, we had difficulty handling all the emails received at night.
Ms. Aya Hashimoto
In fact, we had not changed our work style for 8 years after I joined the team. However, as a result of reviewing our work, we came to the conclusion that we needed to outsource part of our tasks to E-Guardian Philippines Inc., the local subsidiary in the Philippines, in order to provide the same service level even at night.
Prior to outsourcing, we compared E-Guardian Philippines with other companies, and its flexibility in operations was the deciding factor. Its stance of “thinking of the best ways, and doing it together” instead of making us adjust to its packaged services allowed me to easily picture better operations with E-Guardian Philippines.
The services that we are outsourcing to E-Guardian Philippines have expanded, and are currently 24/7 operations with 25 members, even though we started with just 3 members. Frankly speaking, we can fully trust the team members of E-Guardian Philippines because they thoroughly follow the workflow and rules, such as escalating to the team leader when they encounter cases they are not sure how to handle.
E-Guardian Philippines has been very helpful with standards we had not clarified, such as KPI and training indicators, and by sharing with us management methods developed through their extensive experience. Therefore, we gained confidence that we could establish a great partnership with E-Guardian Philippines.
Entrust all of the tasks that can be manualized such as initial responses and business negotiations.
- Our customer support involves not only email correspondence but also business negotiations. We entrust E-Guardian Philippines with all of these tasks. In addition to this, we sometimes ask them to help with after-sales services.
- The results of our partnership with E-Guardian Philippines have been clearly visible. In terms of inventory management, 24-hour operations have enabled us to confirm customers' purchase intentions promptly, allowing us to improve sales efficiency.
Moreover, we were able to expand our business and improve inventory turnover as well. Thanks to this, even if some business negotiations fall through or are canceled, we can immediately cancel reservations for vehicles and propose other vehicles to customers.
The partnership with E-Guardian Philippines brought about significant changes to our work. Customer correspondence used to be our main focus, but now we can spend more time on marketing and managing business negotiations, including troubleshooting, which leads to improved response quality. It goes without saying that customer satisfaction is one of the key factors in our business. We aim to gain trust from customers and ensure they feel our services are reliable, which will lead to a higher conversion rate and potential future sales. Given this success, we are planning to outsource more tasks to E-Guardian Philippines.
Our expectation; Multi-lingual support, anti-illegal operation, quality improvement.
- Aside from our monthly sales target of 20,000 units, one of the imminent challenges at hand is transferring operational work from the Japan team, as the tasks we would like to outsource are piling up.
- Currently, we provide multilingual customer support in languages such as English, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Russian, and Mongolian. Among these, E-Guardian Philippines currently handles English and French, while we are still insourcing the rest. If E-Guardian Philippines can secure human resources proficient in these other languages, we would love to entrust those tasks to them as well.
Another priority on my mind is preventing illicit operations (fraud). At present, our business is split 50-50 between B2B and B2C, but fraudulent activity will surely be a big issue once we start focusing more on B2C in the near future. From the perspective of efficiency,prevention measures should be standardized and prepared for outsourcing as soon as possible, and we may need further help from E-Guardian in auditing and monitoring.
Once again, I would like to emphasize that the advantages of E-Guardian's services are not only skillful employees but also flexibility in new operations and a willingness to take on challenges. I hope that we can count on the continued support of E-Guardian Philippines and move forward together through trial and error.
As of now, our No.1 priority is to improve our operational skills so
that we can further increase customer satisfaction. It is clear that there is still much room for improvement in workflow and sales skills to meet customers’ expectations.
We hope that we can collaborate with E-Guardian Philippines on this matter, ultimately increasing the closing rate—a shared KPI for both parties—by improving the
quality of our response.
