11-22-2017 -- From its modest beginnings in Cleveland, Ohio as a vehicle security company to its leadership position today in the connected car world, Directed has grown tremendously while keeping a sharp focus on consumer service, tech support, and dealer relations.

According to James Turner, senior vice president of product and technical services, who will mark his 16th anniversary with the company this month, it was about a

year ago when Directed made a critical change to fuse back together several departments—namely tech support and product development—that had been operating independently of one another.

“It made sense because product design depends so much on the voice of our customer and the techs have the closest relationship to the installers,” Turner said. “I view installers as our first customer and the end-consumer as the second one.”

Today, there are three legs of support to address dealers, consumers, and installers.

Directed’s dealer customer service department handles dealers and sales reps. “This group addresses warranties, processes orders, sets up new dealers with our reps, gives reporting information on different customers, and follows up on satisfaction issues,” Turner said.

Consumer service handles calls from end users. “We get contacted about SmartStart—maybe a consumer has a remote they want to reprogram to their system or they might have an inquiry about one of our systems in general.”

The technical support team, (not surprisingly) the largest group in the company (operating with a staff of more than 20 people), is split between Montreal and Vista, Calif., where Directed is headquartered. “Our office in Canada focuses on sales and mostly engineering product development while the office here in California is some engineering but mostly sales.”

Tech support is a busy department and has weekly meetings to stay on top of it all, Turner said. “Every Tuesday we go through the escalations to talk about the top issues our team is hearing about on the phone,” said Turner. “Yes, we have lots of written reports, but it’s better for people to be face to face to talk through these things. We also have PSRs in the field—Product Specialist Representatives. There are seven—two here in California; three are based in their own regions of the eastern, western, and central U.S.; and there is one for each side of Canada. We get these groups together two times a year to go over what our plan will be in the field, but we are getting feedback from them on an every-other-week basis.

"They are doing trainings in the field (we train about 5,000 installers per year), visiting install shops and going back into the bays and spending quality time with the installers. Then they provide us with feedback of whatever they are learning.”

It All Clicks

While phone lines used to be the dominant way to field questions, that's no longer the case. What has become a big deal is click-and-chat. “We have two different applications of support look-up solutions: flashing and changing configurations with Directechs Mobile, then we have another app called DirectLink that is used on our new DS4 product,” Turner said. “These two apps put an immediate solution in someone’s hands. The benefit is that an installer doesn’t have to go back to a computer and search for something. It’s right there so they can look it up immediately. Once they go back to the installation in the car, they can stay in the car. We found that even though the solutions are much more complicated—because they are all so vehicle-specific—we are using apps to make the user or the installation experience much easier.

Turner believes that it's much more intuitive to walk through the process step by step with screens. Within the apps, there is click-to-chat so an installer can instantly contact one of Directed's agents right when they have a problem while still sitting in their car. "A chat option will pop up and they can have a conversation with them about the issues that they are encountering and go through the trouble-shooting to rectify it.”

The company plans to continue working on app development, according to Turner. “Within an app, if an installer goes through a specific vehicle and configures all of the settings, and they have a specific matter, they can save it to their favorites, and the next time they see that vehicle it will remind them that they already did a vehicle like this,” Turner said. “Ultimately, it will save the installer time and having to remember what they set up on a car they worked on 45 days ago.”