Rush cares. That’s not just a slogan. The dealer group recognizes the harmful impact of downtime on customers and freight movement. No one wants to be sidelined.
That understanding of customer desires led the more than 150 location dealer group to create its RushCare Customer Support Center nearly four years ago, and it is the resounding success of the department that drives the company to continue investing in its customer experience team and bolster its go-to-market capabilities.
During a visit to its customer support center at its New Braunfels, Texas, corporate headquarters Tuesday during its annual Tech Skills Rodeo, Kirk Barnhard, director of operations, Technology and Innovation, shared how Rush Enterprises is leveraging technology and product expertise to turn downtime into a past time.
“RushCare is kind of the think tank of Rush Enterprises,” he says. “We’re constantly trying to come up with new innovative things that differentiate ourselves from our competition. … We’re constantly evaluating, ‘What is the voice of our customer?’”
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How do they answer that? It starts with communication.
Operationally, RushCare is a multi-faceted operation with hundreds of associates specializing in parts acquisition and service event management.
On the parts side, the teamhas nearly 200 agents nationwide that serve as backstops for individual location parts departments. Any parts call a dealership is unable to answer in 15 seconds is routed to the RushCare team, who fulfills the customer’s request through the nearest available location to get them back up and running immediately. The team also works with dealership procurement associates and OE partners to source hard to find components required for shop repairs. On a regular day, Barnhard says the department fields nearly 4,500 parts calls, and fewer than 5% go unanswered.
The company’s service side is equally impressive. RushCare offers a comprehensive service program available to all customers who purchase equipment through Rush Truck Centers, though Barnhard says customers who bought their truck from another dealer can still sign up to use the department’s many services. The crowned jewel of RushCare is Rush’s service concierge team, who can support customers during all service interactions. Available 24/7, 365 days a year, Barnhard says this team exists to create transparency and improve communication during service events while also acquiring and analyzing service data to improve fleet health and Rush network proficiency.
He says customers can use the support center proactively — enabling the Rush team to schedule preventive maintenance, monitor equipment and identify future service needs — or reactively during unplanned unit down service events.
Rush has dedicated team members assigned to each of its top 30 accounts but Barnhard says any customer can use the service. And many do. Acceptance of the program grows each day.
“We’re trying to make it easy to do business with Rush Truck Centers,” Barnhard says. “We want to create partnerships with our customers.”
Once a customer starts using RushCare, Barnhard says they quickly realize how all-encompassing the service can be. He says when the dealer group began developing the program it assumed most service requests would fall into a few established categories. That hasn’t been the case. Every fleet is different and so are their needs and challenges. Barnhard says RushCare is malleable to that reality.
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“Everything we do is completely customizable to [a fleet’s] needs,” he says.
RushCare also is a program constantly in flux. Barnhard says as equipment becomes more connected and carriers become more accepting of technology as a means to driving uptime, Rush is always seeking to improve its processes and make its customer experience unit stronger. He references the company’s acceptance of AI to support parts ordering and expanding its master technician workforce and technological resources to better improve diagnostic and triage capabilities within the program.
Barnhard says each improvement makes Rush Truck Centers “sticky so customers don’t need to go anywhere else.”
The dealer group seeks out customer guidance too. Barnhard says Rush expects to receive more than 80,000 pieces of feedback this year and welcomes even more. Any suggestion is worth considering, he says.
“We don’t know how to say no. That’s not our job. That’s a dirty word around here,” Barnhard says.
