Service innovation on a budget: How an HVAC leader is using Atheer to help build a new service network

Service Innovation on a Budget: How an HVAC Leader is Using Atheer to Help Build a New Service Network

Local partners are essential as Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) expand and start new business operations. They rely on dealers and service partners to meet their goals for revenue growth by being the first (and, arguably, the most important) touchpoint in the customer lifecycle. When the expansion involves new geographical regions, it’s necessary to have partners who can help navigate the business landscape and who know the competitive environment.

Our client’s senior sales director, and Atheer customer, knows this well. He’s responsible for developing and overseeing a new sales channel in the US for a subsidiary of one of the world's largest home appliance and consumer electronics manufacturers. His division is responsible for growing the company’s commercial and residential HVAC solutions and achieving revenue growth through a network of independent dealers and service providers.

One of the initial objectives towards that goal is establishing a support team. One team would have to support a large and geographically distributed partner network. They need a lean organization with innovative and efficient processes to keep costs down.

The service support challenge

Independent HVAC dealers and service providers are well-versed in installation and service, and they enter OEM partnerships with expectations for revenue growth and profitability.

With this understanding, the sales director established an operating model to provide his new partners with all the information required to make product installation seamless. Under this model, his team has to set up the support processes to assist the partners and guide them through installation. They also need to ensure partners follow warranty processes or incur higher costs in warranty leakage.

Delivery of those processes isn’t trivial. When information is hard to find, is unclear, or falls below a partner’s standards, support time can quickly add up in corrections and clarifications. In the case of residential service providers, sometimes they simply move on to the next customer—leaving the customer with a problem to be solved by another technician.

The sales director turned to Atheer’s no-code mobile-first platform designed to assist service partners cost-effectively.

Atheer helps deliver expert support cost-effectively

Atheer is helping the US sales director ensure installations are done correctly by the right service providers while eliminating the need for a large support center.

Here’s how:

‍Providing easy-to-access onboarding and training content

‍The sales director wants a superior user experience to impress partners and capture mindshare. His team created short and simple onboarding videos and wants to deliver them in context. Keeping his service providers productive on-site with easy-to-use tools is the goal.

Atheer’s mobile app is used without support intervention to direct service teams to content while they work—answering their questions and helping them troubleshoot instantly. Service partners get the answers they need, and with two-way communications via the app, support groups get real-time feedback on how well their onboarding and training assets are used on-site. They improve their content and the service teams' experiences simultaneously—improving onboarding and training efficiency.

‍Certifying service partners

‍Ongoing training for service partners is time-consuming and becomes more so when partners’ service teams suffer from high turnover.  The sales director knows the value of a great partner and his company's brand. His products lend credibility to a dealer’s portfolio and a technician’s expertise. He wants to ensure his products provide dealers and service providers with opportunities for revenue growth, so properly certifying service partners is a priority. Keeping certification information readily available for his support teams is also necessary. Instant access to certification data streamlines updates to their service partners’ teams with the latest product information and training modules.

With Atheer, they’re looking forward to providing an on-demand multi-media content library they automatically push to the appropriate service technicians depending on their certification levels and prior learnings. Service teams won’t have the overhead of separately-accessed and on-demand learning management. By leveraging Atheer’s mobile-first platform, support teams control the pace and scope of learning—improving their partners’ ability to serve customers.

‍Eliminating redundancies in the warranty registration processInitial partner processes used Excel sheets and legacy procedures for registering warranties. Management reporting was manual. It created extra work for the service support teams and was also prone to errors. Atheer is used to record the registration during the installation process—eliminating the service provider's double work of imputing service notes in one system and using another for logging warranty registrations. The advantage for the support team is one system for instant data collection and reporting—saving them time and effort.

Business impact and next steps

The sales director is confident that the solution would help the company streamline manual processes and eliminate the need for volumes of support calls. To that end, he’s driving a program to establish service histories using Atheer. The program will catalog work at each customer site. His vision is to provide another layer of information to enable his service providers while saving his support group from manually entering this information on job requests. The sales director and his support team can already see signs that the processes they implement with Atheer will help them stand out as the best brand to work with by independent dealers and resellers.

About Atheer

Atheer has provided leading OEMs worldwide with a powerful platform and solutions to deepen their relationship with distribution partners, contractors, and technicians. Self-service capabilities, digital workflows, remote visual support, and more have enabled OEMs to guide partners quickly and cost-effectively.

Our proven solutions have helped clients with a 40% reduction in service resolution time, a 90% increase in service efficiency, a 25% reduction in technician onboarding, and a 30% increase in first-time fix rates. Get a demo, today.