BE FORWARD is one of the leading companies in the E-commerce industry of used cars, and exports used cars to more than 200 countries. While their sales reach about 15,000 vehicles per month, BE FORWARD has decided to establish a partnership with E-guardian in order to correspond quickly to emails and phone calls from countries having a time gap. Here is the interview. We have learned about how the new services were introduced and its outcome from Ms. Aya Hashimoto, a manager of sales operations for African regions.
Background Leading up to the Partnership
Proposal capability 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 call from over 200 countries, mainly African regions. However, one of our biggest problems is a time gap between Japan and other countries. Since our business hours are 10 hours from 9am to 7pm (JST), we could not correspond to the emails that we received around closing time and it could not be helped making customers wait for our replies until the following day. Actually, about 1000 emails arrive during closing time to opening time and 50 employees handle them starting from 9am. Sometimes, we had a difficulty in handling all of them that we received at night.
Ms. Aya Hashimoto
In fact, we did not change our work style for 8 years after I joined the team. However, as a result of reviewing our work, we have come to a conclusion that we need to outsource some parts 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 a deciding factor. Its stance “think of best ways, and do 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, which is currently 24 hours and 7days 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, like they do escalation to the team leader once they encounter some cases they are not sure how to tackle.
E-Guardian Philippines are very helpful with the standards we had not clarified, such as KPI and Training indicators, and sharing us management methods that had been developed through its rich experiences. Therefore, we got confidence that we could establish 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 is not only email corresponding but also includes business negotiations. We entrust E-Guardian Philippines with all of these task . In addition to this, we sometimes ask them to help with after-sale services.
- The outcomes of partnership with E-Guardian Philippines have been obviously apparent. In terms of inventory management, 24-hour operations have enabled us to confirm our customers' purchase intentions in a timely manner, which made it possible for us to improve efficiency in sales. Moreover, we could expand business and improved inventory turnover as well. Because of that, even though some of the business negotiations are broken or canceled, we can immediately cancel reserved vehicles, and propose other vehicles to customers.
The partnership with E-Guardian Philippines brought about significant changes of our work. Customer correspondence used to be our main work, but now, we can spend more time on marketing and business negotiations management including troubleshooting which leads to improvement of the quality of our response. It goes without saying that customer satisfaction is one of the key factors of our business. We would like to gain trust from customers and let them feel our services are reliable that will bring a higher conversion rate and possible future sales. With this, we are planning to outsource more tasks to E-Guardian Philippines.
Our expectation; Multi-lingual support, anti-illegal operation, quality improvement.
- Aside from the sales target that is 20,000 units sold per month, one of the imminent challenges at hand is operational work transfer from the japan team and the tasks we would like to outsource are piling up.
- Currently, we provide multi-lingual customer support such as English, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Russian and Mongolian. Among these, if E-Guardian Philippines handles English and French while we are still insourcing the rest. So, E-Guardian Philippines has a chance to get human resources proficient in these languages, we would love to entrust tasks in other languages.
Another thing in my mind is anti-illegal operation. At present, B2B and B2C are 50% respectively in our business but illegal operation 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 manualized and prepared for outsourcing as soon as possible, and we may need another help from E-guardian in auditing and monitoring.
Once again, I would like to emphasize that the advantages of service of E-guardian is not only skillful employees but also flexibility for new operations and willingness for challenges. I would hope that we could have 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 improve more customer satisfactions. Apparently, there are still much room for improvement of workflow and sales skills to meet customers’ expectations. We hope that we can collaborate with E-Guardian Philippines on this matter, which will eventually increase the closing rate which is KPI for the both parties by improving the quality of our response.
