YR Connect – Improved customer support and equipment uptime
Youngman Richardson (YR) is a leading importer and distributor of contracting, industrial and commercial equipment. YR has been serving the construction, hire and agriculture industries throughout New Zealand for over 43 years and is proud to be 100% NZ owned and operated.
Highlights
Overview
Connected machine telematics for proactive maintenance management and asset security.
Key Requirements
- Change equipment service model from scheduled to operating runtime
- Improve customer service with timely parts and service offers
- Improve customer service with location monitoring for asset security and recovery
- Increase uptake of service and parts sales
- Increase customer loyalty
- Create a competitive differentiator with connected machine services
Asset Type and Number
Hundreds of assets comprising more than a dozen product lines:
- Plate compactors
- Mini excavators
- Elevated Work Platforms (EWPs)
- Rammers
- Concrete grinders
- Rail booms
- Pedestrian rollers
- Portable generators
- Water pumps
- Asphalt pavers
- Concrete pumps
- Dust suppressors
Solution Overview
- Custom white-label platform (website and mobile app) – YR Connect
- A range of IoT devices and accessories covering both powered and unpowered asset times on 4G cellular network
- Monthly data import for new asset sales
- Custom data export to Hubspot for lead management
- Ongoing contributions to development roadmap (enhancements and improvements)
Implementation
Deployed 2020. Used by multiple branches covering New Zealand nationwide.
Key results
Improvements to customer retention and aftersales revenue growth.
The Problem
After 40+ years of business, YR wanted to utilise technology to help grow the business. New machine sales were steady, but the business wanted to improve its aftersales attachment rate and increase parts and service revenue. With the goal of boosting the dealership’s absorption rate (dealership costs covered by margin on parts and services).
After years of reactive servicing, prompted by phone calls, YR wanted to transform into a proactive service mode where they were always informed of machinery’s maintenance requirements and able to offer a higher level of service to their customers. In this regard, YR wanted to reduce equipment downtime and breakdown incidents and provide more predictable planned maintenance based on actual machine runtime, timely service kit offers, and create greater efficiency within their service team and improve resource planning.
YR knew that technology and digital services were the key to improving their customer’s experience, strengthening loyalty and giving their Sales and Parts departments greater opportunity to grow aftersales.
YR turned to Blackhawk to help realise their vision of YR Connect – a branded, all-encompassing telematics and machine data platform.
The Challenge
YR offers a diverse range of equipment from 28 different brands. Finding a solution provider who can consolidate telematics systems across multiple equipment makes was the first requirement.
Much of YR’s internal processes relied on well-established paperwork and systems as well as long held habits with Sales and machine preparation. This meant challenges in change management as new technologies and processes were introduced to augment or replace traditional ways of working. This included the ability for YR technicians to self-install telematics hardware onto newly sold machinery during the precheck process before delivery to the customer.
Introducing these new technologies and services to customers was also seen as a challenge. How to create customer facing solutions that gave them access to connected machine data?
The Solution
Blackhawk’s proven white-label SaaS platform provided an ideal solution for YR, ticking a number of key requirements:
- Provide a turnkey, branded telematics platform
- Provide a branded mobile application and account security to give each YR customer secure oversight of their own assets
- Ability to connect multiple different asset types across different brands into one system
- Ability to raise alerts and reminders for planned equipment maintenance based on accurate monitoring of operating hours
- Provide real-time location updates to help customers understand where their assets are and help recover assets in the event of theft
Figure 1: YR Connect is a full turnkey telematics solution with administration tools, customer-facing mobile application, and multi-tenant architecture (supports multiple customer accounts).
Blackhawk provided training and support to YR technicians to enable them to install telematics hardware on new machines being delivered to customers. As a full turnkey system, Blackhawk supplies YR with tracking devices suited to the various classes of assets being sold.
Figure 2: YR Connect delivers value-added connected machine data, runtime service reminders, location data and theft recovery benefits to YR customers.
Blackhawk also provided integration into Hubspot. Hubspot was introduced as a proven sales pipeline management system that could keep track of customer service opportunities and manage those leads through to completion. Blackhawk integrated service reminders into Hubspot to automatically generate lead-cards that the Aftersales Team could then action.
The Result
YR have found a key point of customer service differentiation that sets them apart from other equipment dealers.
“YR Connect has allowed us to better serve our customers by being across their equipment’s service needs and helping them keep track of their assets,” said Phil Fairfield, Sales Director at Youngman Richardson.
“In the wake of COVID-19 our technicians and resources have been pushed to the limit. With shortages of skilled labour and supply of parts we needed solutions that could help us better manage our limited resources and plan ahead. Blackhawk is helping us start to gain some of that efficiency and foresight.”
“Our customers are responding well to the addition of YR Connect and it has proven it’s value several times when equipment has been stolen. One customer had four generators stolen and then recovered within the space of a week thanks to YR Connect giving them updates on the equipment’s location. This has further cemented our relationships with those important accounts and that’s something we look forward to doing more for all our customers,” continued Mr. Fairfield.
With YR Connect, Youngman Richardson have realised a range of benefits proving out their return on investment:
- Customer loyalty has improved 16%
- An estimated 15% uplift in new machinery sales
- Parts sales have grown 30%
- Service revenue has grown a further 15%
“Working with Blackhawk has helped us understand the potential for our business and the growth we can achieve in Aftersales. We are putting more attention on this area of the business and staffing up to help grow this area and Blackhawk and YR Connect are pivotal to making that happen. We are looking forward to the future enhancements and capabilities that Blackhawk are working on to help us streamline our processes and improve the experience for our customers and our parts and service teams.”
Phil Fairfield – Sales Director, Youngman Richardson
The Equipment
Constantly growing connected machine base, adding more and more opportunity for parts and sales revenue over more than a dozen machinery product lines:
yr telematics case study asphalt pavers
yr telematics case study mini excavator
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yr telematics case study compactor
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Compactors
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yr telematics case study rammers
About Blackhawk
Blackhawk enables real, measurable digital transformation. We connect machines, vehicles and assets to service teams, operational teams, and your customers through a combination of IoT devices, managed SaaS and smartphone applications, creating transformative customer engagement, service excellence and increased revenue.
Since 2005, Blackhawk has enabled businesses and financiers to track and manage their vehicles and assets. We work with New Zealand’s largest enterprises, including Spark IoT, to deliver branded and managed SaaS systems that are both trusted and proven.