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:
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.
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:
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.
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:
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:
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:
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.
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: