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As one of the top 10 car manufacturers in the world Nissan is part of a highly competitive industry. Margins are constantly declining as companies find new ways to gain competitive advantages and reduce their overhead costs. Nissan's National Sales Company in Greece, Nic.J.Theocarakis S.A., with 100+ dealerships is no exception, and the employees of Nissan Greece are always looking for ways to reduce costs.
One such opportunity was identified in dealers and employee support. Warehouse personnel are currently required to provide support to dealers - who are calling in asking questions regarding their orders and about information about spare parts availability, and operators are required to provide support to employees looking to locate information they need regarding dealers telephone numbers, contact persons, zip codes, etc. Providing this kind of support is a very costly endeavor.
As with many companies, the ability to quickly access relevant information is essential. Nissan Greece identified an opportunity to reduce costs and improve service by leveraging their existing Sametime enterprise IM environment.
Operators at Nissan Greece often found themselves answering the same questions over and over again and Michalis Moraitis, head of Nissan Greece's Information System department knew there must be a more efficient means of providing this type of support in a cost effective and professional manner.
With the problem identified, Michalis Moraitis began to research and locate possible solutions. Moraitis was looking for an automated support solution that would vastly reduce human interaction during support calls from both customers and employees, while at the same time be cost effective and deliver great results. In his research Moraitis located Instant Technologies' Instant Agent Framework application. The tool enables the rapid creation of Lotus Sametime based bots and utilizes Nissan's existing Lotus Sametime environment to query Nissan's Lotus Domino directories all through instant messaging.
Instant Agent Framework was a perfect match for Michalis and Nissan Greece since it met all of Moraitis' requirements. Bots created through Instant Agent Framework would be able to perform a wide array of queries allowing employees to access relevant information from Nissan's Domino databases, and with the use of STlinks there was the potential to allow customers to access bots through the Nissan Greece website. By enabling people to quickly locate answers to common questions, the frequency of operator assisted inquiries could be vastly reduced. Better yet, these IM bots could be developed and deployed in as little as 20 minutes with no complex programming. Like most people, Michalis was cautious in his evaluation of Instant Agent Framework and other bot technologies.
"We did search for other products, and solutions, but the results were disappointing. [The other solutions required] More time to setup, more knowledge to invest and acquire, more money to spend. After a couple of tries we returned back to evaluate the solution from instant technologies"
In evaluating Instant Agent Framework Moraitis was able to successfully create a number of bots in a short time span and Instant Agent Framework proved to be the best solution.
"The evaluation of the product was easy. Almost every requirement was met and only few extra special requirements administering the environment were not provided. These requirements were communicated to the support team and the new version has these enhancements."
Instant Agent Framework bot technology was an instant success at Nissan Greece. Employees quickly adopted the new system and found that it was a much more efficient means of accessing information. Michalis Moraitis was able to track the bot usage through Instant Agent Framework's logging and administrative tools that create summaries of bot usage.
Telephone operators and secretaries were most affected by the implementation of the Lotus Sametime bots. The bots vastly reduced the number of phone calls and time required to find information. Information is now readily available to all employees and customers 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and 365 days a year. According to Moraitis they are now evaluating another version of Instant Agent Framework to create bots to query the companies Microsoft ADO databases as well.
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