Our project which started in November of 2011 is aptly named: "The Dealership of the Future" for more reasons than one might think. I'm going to share a timeline of all the events that happened and what's to come in the near weeks. This particular blog entry is an overview of what we're doing. I'll be blogging separately on each piece of the project to provide more detail which I hope can help you implement Microsoft cloud solutions more successfully. So enough of this, let's talk about the "Dealership of the Future" which is located in Salt Lake City, UT. Enter Murdock Hyundai.
What we had to overcome:
Murdock Hyundai of Salt Lake City
What we had to overcome:
- The spam in email was overwhelming
- Email server reliability was non-existent
- Telephone calls were echoing, dropped calls, limited features
- Desktops were bogged down with bloatware, spyware and viruses
- Internet bandwidth was 10% of the purchased speeds
- No policy for email was enforceable
- Employees were frustrated
- Executives were confused
- Consumers couldn't find vehicles on our websites
- Employees were questioned about items on our website but couldn't find them
- There was no available budget to spend on the challenge
Products we used to overcome the challenges:
- Office365 ( for eMail )
- Windows Intune
- 3CX Phone System
- Yealink handsets
- Sharepoint Online ( Office365 )
- Windows Phone
- Windows 7
- Windows Slates
- Windows Desktops
How we overcame the challenges with Microsoft products and services
First, we had to organize the challenges by importance. We figured that communicating with the customer in person, on the phone and in email was critical so we started there first. After all, this business is about selling cars to consumers and technology was in the way of that happening.
We moved the entire organization of 130 people to Office365 using the migration tools provided to Microsoft Partners through the MPN. There were 3 total locations to migrate with the bulk working out of their corporate headquarters in Salt Lake City. eMail was migrated over a Sunday with zero downtime for communication, especially important to their internet department which focuses on responding to leads from websites like their own as well as third party sites like Vehix.com ( which we also co-Founded ) and Autotrader.com. Monday morning when everyone came to work, their email was working just like it did on the Saturday when they left after a record sales day. "My new Windows Phone is so great!" said K. Blake Murdock, "now I can actually see my calendar and when I get invites to meetings they aren't an unreadable email that makes no sense. It's awesome"
Next, we tackled the phone problem with a vengeance.
We tried to retain the existing Polycom IP phones but eventually replaced them with Yealink phones which are much more user friendly and programmable. Voice quality improved instantly and we were able to recover most of the cost of the replacement handsets by selling them on eBay. We also replaced the firewall and switches in the dealership with business-grade equipment which fixed the VOIP quality issue as well as the degraded speeds of 2 megs up and down when they had subscribed to Comcast's business internet at 25 Megs. Immediately we started seeing 25 Meg speeds and the project moved forward. We threw away the D-link router and Linksys firewall. We then ordered a PRI and brought copper in and tied it into the 3CX phone system ( a fellow Microsoft Partner ) so that when/if the internet went down, the phones would still work wonderfully. We tied all three stores together using a unique bridging feature in the 3CX phone system so that customers were guaranteed to speak to a human voice at all times when calling the stores. We programmed hot buttons to do things like paging and parking and trained the staff on the use of the phones. The internet department proposed a routing feature to make sure that all inbound internet sales calls were handled immediately which we were able to program into the phone system as well. Call tracking, recording and status were implemented into the CRM they use and finally, we started to see a smooth flow of customer calls in and out of the three locations with no interruption of frustrated employees.
At this point, we had overcome many of the challenges in less than a week and for a budget they could stomach. The only real expense they had so far was the firewall and switches. So what was left to do?
- Desktops were bogged down with bloatware, spyware and viruses
- Consumers couldn't find vehicles on our websites
- Employees were questioned about items on our website but couldn't find them
We completely redesigned the websites which were provided by a third party and only getting the stores ~6,000 visits a month. The new websites were responsive in design, incredibly fast and indexed perfectly for search engines. We launched the websites on February 3, 2012. The initial goal was to get to at least 10,000 visitors to the sites. 15,000 visitors later in the first month, their sales were up for February and March and now we had a reason to get excited. We proved with just a few changes, we can afford to budget some big change at the store!
The next big challenge was to investigate the issues with all the desktops and devices in the store.
If you aren't yet familiar with Windows Intune, you need to be. This amazing tool provided by Microsoft has made managing the store a thing of the past. After deploying Intune which was a breeze by placing the installer on a USB stick and physically walking to each PC we had a "map" of the dealership P.C.s with inventory on software, bloatware, viruses, games ( yes I said games ) as well as health reports on disk space, memory utilization and more. We took a training course on Intune in the Microsoft Learning Center and became advocates instantly. Again on a Sunday we tackled the desktops by removing all viruses, removing software, updating Windows Updates and remotely restarting the computers. We instituted policies for passwords, software installation and optimized the existing hardware. We intend next to start using MDOP to make some of the oldest hardware useful in the organization.
In Summary
WIthout the partnership we have with Microsoft as a Gold Web Development, Gold Software Development, Gold Application Integration as well as 5 Silver Competencies and 3 Cloud Competencies we never could have pulled this off. We implemented a Microsoft Attack on this dealership's technology needs and we succeeded because of the resources provided us by Microsoft, our dedication to training and certification as well as the trust this dealership has in us.
Contact Information regarding this blog post:
RyanTech
Kevin McMillen, Founder
Murdock Hyundai of Salt Lake City
K Blake Murdock, General Manager
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