For our industrial EV manufacturing client, migrating from Salesforce to HubSpot was only one part of the equation. They wanted to give nationwide dealers an easier way to submit service requests. Problem was, the service process required them to manually input long strings of text from thousands of VIN numbers!
A recipe for confusion and costly mistakes.
Discover more about how Unlimited’s technical team devised an innovative way to query VINs from a single database using HubSpot Operations Hub, Service Hub, and custom code:
What’s Thousands of VINs Got To Do With It?
Our Industrial EV manufacturing client specializes in producing electric utility vehicles and delivery trucks for commercial and industrial use. As one of America's fast-growing industrial EV manufacturers, the company required new processes to match its unprecedented growth.
With nearly 20,000 VINs and no automated solutions to manage and query an avalanche of data, our client knew they needed a more streamlined process to handle dealer service requests.
With nearly 20,000 VINs and no automated solutions to manage and query an avalanche of data, our client knew they needed a more streamlined process to handle dealer service requests.
A growing number of 10s of thousands of VINs made errors more likely, increasing false-claim costs to our client. To overcome this, our team devised an automated custom search solution tied to each dealer’s unique vehicle list. Instead of manually inputting long VIN strings, our solution instantly queried and auto populated requests from thousands of product data points from a single database.
Overcoming Existing Roadblocks
Before implementing the custom VIN lookup solution, dealers in their nationwide network had to manually create a ticket within a slow customer portal. To create a ticket, a 17-character code had to be entered manually, using digits or letters. Two concerns emerged here:
- Time-consuming process: Ticket creation proved to be drawn out, with an unnecessarily long process of manual typing.
- Invalid data concerns: If a dealer typed just one digit or letter wrong, the VIN would be invalid, and the service team would be unable to find the vehicle they were looking for.
The above ultimately meant more work and discovery for the dealers and the service team. They needed a way to prevent these VIN errors from happening – so they turned to Unlimited for help.
Implementing Innovative Solutions
After learning about our client's goals, we began generating ideas to link their internal database to an outside portal.
First, we proposed providing a complete list of VINs at ticket creation. Each dealer could type until they found their desired result. However, this initial idea presented a security challenge. Our team changed the process so that only the related VIN’s appeared; e.g., if a dealer signs in, they will only see their VINs. This method made mistyping a VIN impossible.
Furthermore, when a ticket is created by a dealer, instead of copying and pasting the VIN and associating it with a vehicle, the related vehicle is automatically associated. From the reporting standpoint, this process was highly beneficial as every problematic vehicle is ticketed automatically in HubSpot Service Hub irrespective of whether the service representative has updated the information in the system.
This novel process delivered:
- Enhanced security: The dealer or rep can't accidentally leak an entire product or sales history into the Internet, nor put vital dealership info into the hands of other dealers.
- A simplified process: The process became significantly simpler by not showing unrelated vehicles in the search.
- Improved responsiveness: The massive reduction in VIN retrieval resulted in a substantially improved response time to the customer experience and reduced load on internal systems.
Everything we developed made our client's novel lookup solution more compliant, secure, and responsive. Luckily, Unlimited's output exceeded their initial expectations, and their team was thrilled with the new system upon the demo.
Next, our team moved on to Phase 2, which consisted of a similar sign-up process, but here, the dealer needed to select their specific dealership from the website. Finding their specific dealership was lengthy, with hundreds existing in the system. We delivered a solution design that repurposed the above process to overcome manual data entry.
Another challenge our team tackled was optimizing the ticket association process, which resulted in the following outcomes:
- We used HubSpot Operations Hub to copy the VIN to find the vehicle. Simultaneously to ticket creation, each link associated the specific vehicle with its own ticket. As a result, service reps save time in searching for individual vehicles. They also can access vehicle information in a centralized hub - including vehicle details, issues, and details on individual requests.
- We aligned the above process with each vehicle's original sales process, resulting in information captured on vehicle build, delivery, ticket issues and resolutions, and dealerships. This alignment resulted in less fragmentation and a more seamless reporting process.
Every Limitation Has Its Silver Lining
Although the above processes seemed straightforward in theory, we ran into some issues during the implementation phase. Firstly, we encountered specific limitations within HubSpot that did not accommodate our client's nearly 20,000 vehicle volume.
To maintain responsiveness, HubSpot APIs only allowed us to retrieve a maximum of 1,000 VIN's from a custom Vehicle object, per page visit. After several stops and starts, our technology team discovered that retrieving 1,000 VINs per session was the only possible answer.
Additionally, integrating new processes directly into HubSpot's support portal proved difficult. Because we couldn't customize it or run Javascript in the portal, adding context to the typing function was impossible.
To overcome this, we:
- Wrote custom Javascript to replace a standard text-box rendered by HubSpot on a form for VIN to a dropdown list.
- Implemented a call to the HubSpot API to retrieve vehicles related to the signed-in user only, providing vehicle VIN’s to the autocomplete list for the dropdown list. Keeping the same field IDs allowed HubSpot to accept the field back as if it is still just a text field during form submission.
- Last, we handed HubSpot back a copy of the field that looks like the original, so all text fields remained aligned.
Although the above limitations proved to be tricky, they also came with a silver lining: a more compliant, secure, and responsive solution. This solution not only gave internal teams an accurate service request history, it offered a vehicle timeline from conception to delivery and utilization.
Out in the field, their service teams can now see the entire lifetime of each vehicle in HubSpot. The team's custom reporting process is simplified, as individual data points live in one centralized, easy-to-access hub.
Conclusion
The Unlimited team made it possible to optimize the lookup solution for tens of thousands of Vehicle Identification Numbers effortlessly. The outcome? Our client experienced improved security, smoother data entry, and faster responsiveness.
Overall, our client's data integrity increased dramatically, and they can now benefit from a lifetime view of each vehicle within their system. We are confident they are ready to progress to the next phase, which involves a deeper integration of their core tools with HubSpot.
Learn more about our work with our Industrial EV manufacturing client here:
