Multi-level global support center for Harman International

Harman International is an American company that manufactures, designs and engineers products for automotive manufacturers, consumers and businesses around the world. The company was founded in 1980 and is known for creating brands such as Harman Kardon, JBL, AKG or Bang & Olufsen.

Challenges

Harman International needed a central system to manage requests that would go to the global customer support department. The main problem was the dispersion of teams and the existence of several channels for the customer to report needs. The teams were also operating with complex rules for escalation, acceptance and assignment of requests to selected teams.

Until the implementation of the central system, employees were only using Microsoft Outlook to handle customer requests. Our goal was to design and implement a new solution that would guarantee a simple and intuitive user experience and maximise team automation. Another challenge was to perform a migration of all emails from the past two months to the Salesforce environment.

Solutions

The aim of the project was to implement the process of handling customer requests on the Salesforce platform and to migrate data from Outlook. Thanks to the prepared solution, requests are automatically categorised and assigned to the appropriate teams. An extensive notification and duplicate detection module reduced the time needed to handle requests.

The prepared solution operated on the Service Cloud platform. As part of the project, a module was created to handle escalation rules, acceptance and assignment based on customer hierarchy and SLA. Reports were generated for managers to keep track of the situation and the workload of each team. The customer portal was prepared in accordance with the Salesforce Community platform, allowing customers to submit, as well as track, their needs. Through the use of the Chatter module, customers and support teams can communicate with each other easily and quickly.

Results

The team designed, developed and implemented the system into the production environment. Thanks to the training carried out and the rapid migration, Harman International achieved its previous efficiency in about a month. In the following weeks, however, their work significantly accelerated.

For the support teams, a single system was set up, introducing a number of facilities and automations, which resulted in shorter handling and resolution times. For customers, on the other hand, a portal was implemented, allowing them to respond in real time to problems they reported. Thanks to the solutions used, communication between customers and internal teams has been significantly simplified.