Case Study: BFM Europe
BFM rely heavily on a number of systems old and new, and they required a modern warranty registration solution that was fully integrated with their legacy CRM & call-out system.
The Problem
BFM manufacture gas, electric and solid fuel fires for various brands in the UK. In an industry that already comes with a number of compliance obligations, warranty management and after-sales is high on the priority list.
BFM needed to properly keep track of end-users themselves to ensure they can properly serve their customers, track servicing, and should they need to, issue a re-call. Rather than a traditional online form, email, or phone service, BFM needed a smooth online registration process that lets their end-users view their registered products, key dates, and upload annual service information to keep warranties valid.
Further to this, reminding end-users that a service is due was an important feature to really show that they stand by their warranty.
The Solution
VizTide built a fully fledged warranty management platform for BFM. Hosted in the web, fully managed, backed up, and of course, modern.
The system needed to work on all platforms, desktop, tablet, mobile. And it does. Sometimes installation engineers are registering warranties on their customer’s behalf, so the process needed to be slick and not waste people’s time.
After registration, the system lets clients login any time to see their registered products and key dates like servicing.
Clients can add new products to their account too, an important feature to ensure products in the same home are grouped and identified to make service bookings smarter, and give customer service staff better context.
Other key features:
- Track marketing consent for product information newsletter
- Admin back-end for staff users to view and maintain users
- Multi-roles to allow proper control over who can see end-user data
Integrating the Solution
So often are systems built to solve a problem, which they do, but they aren’t properly integrated to existing business processes. This risks low adoption, and creates disruption within your first-line team.
To ensure this actually worked, we integrated the warranty portal with several of BFM’s existing processes and platforms.
Sage 1000
BFM maintain their stockist information in Sage 1000 along with their product listings.
We built a custom Sage 1000 data synchroniser to bring product and stockist information up into the warranty platform.
This saves a huge amount of time for end-users because they can pre-select their product, see an image to confirm, and choose their stockist/installer from a list. This also ensures data integrity and consistency across all systems.
Call2Field
Call2Field is a servicing / call-out system with various CRM features that BFM use in-house.
Crucially, BFM have a process where customer service staff use Call2Field to view product installation records and book service calls, issue spare parts for warranty claims, and log technician notes.
VizTide created a custom Call2Field data connector to import new warranty registrations into Call2Field. This happens automatically and means that existing processes are not disrupted.
Data Flow
Understanding the flow of data is so important for a project like this. We are big advocates of maintaining a single source of the truth. This is easy said, but sometimes difficult when you have 3, 4 or 5 systems in play at once.
In BFM’s case, different systems were nominated as the single source of truth for different pieces of data.
This is quite simple to say out loud, but acknowleding the need for it, and articulating it in a way that everyone can understand is so important in making something like this a success!
This is where our consultative approach saves the day – we are pragmatists and seek to understand the full, big-picture before execution. In some cases this involves actually drawing a big picture!
Creating the diagram below helped us work with BFM to identify existing business processes that would change, potential pinch or failure points, and ensure the proper timing of all processes.
“Ben has created a great registration solution for BFM Europe. The site was scoped and built so well, helping BFM register products, freeing up staff for other duties.”
– Paul Bailey, Head of IT, BFM
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