Freshdesk for Bridgestone Corporation

CHALLENGES

• Old-school ticketing systems
• Lack of customer happiness
• Lack of multi-channel support

The Company Founded in 1931, Bridgestone is the world’s largest tire production and distribution company. Implementation and monitoring of their operational and financial strategies happen at the back office solution business unit situated in France and Benelux. Innovative tire technology led their company to become the primary supplier of native equipment to all major car manufacturers. The problem With over 150,000 employees, Bridgestone operates 180 production plants in 26 countries. Bridgestone’s tires cater to a wide market ranging from passenger cars, trucks and buses to agricultural trucks, motor sports and aircrafts. The company’s customer support team for solution business unit is managed by 15 agents who are based in France. Technology at Bridgestone is driven to make life safer for people across various demographics. On an average day, the customer support agents at Bridgestone receive around 95-100 tickets. The topics of the questions range from financial and administrative functions to commercial and information systems. The customer support agents handled their incoming tickets through Outlook and phone channels. The outdated system made it very difficult for them to integrate these channels under one domain. Testing out other SaaS tools failed to work to their benefit considering the limited resources the tools offered. They faced constant dissatisfaction of the customers who waited forever for a follow up. "We adopted Freshdesk because it is a highly adaptable solution with a lot of metrics that allows us to track and follow up on our customers and agents efficiently." - Christophe Tomborski, Back Office Manager, Bridgestone The Solution The company wanted to turn things around and have a solid customer support system that not only provided spectacular multiple channel support but was also simple and effective. They were introduced to Freshdesk by the French authorized reseller, Cirruseo, while they were trying out another product. During their evaluation phase, they tested the full functionality of Freshdesk by testing a web portal. The fully customizable portal arrested their attention immediately. Multiple channel support, ease of use and the SLAs helped them escalate their decision to finalize Freshdesk as their customer support helpdesk. The Benefits For Bridgestone’s agents, the shift to Freshdesk helped them realize their goal of having a single point tool to handle support across all channels. The multiple channel support assists the agents to get back to their customers across all departments with timely responses, which was not feasible previously. Service level agreements (SLAs) deployed using Freshdesk eased their work and increased the productivity. They were 95% successful in scaling up their customer support ladder by responding to tickets faster with the aid of these SLAs. Freshdesk helps Bridgestone’s agents integrate satisfaction surveys into their customer support conversation, allowing them to measure the happiness of their customers. Gamification is another feature which is very popular with the team and motivates everyone to work efficiently. Crisp reports and gamification features of Freshdesk helps the agents keep track of their helpdesk activity and also monitor the efficiency of the entire system.