Text messaging is the most used data service in the world, and Americans text twice as much as they call, according to Nielsen.
Ohio-based Aim Transportation Solutions last year added a feature to Navigator, Aim's mobile app, enabling drivers to communicate with its Road Rescue service team through the app via text. Not only did it bring the company's customer service into 2024, RescuePro was designed to interface with Google Translate for non-English speaking customers. There are upwards of 7,000 different languages spoken around the world.
Aim Transportation Solutions in 2018 created a software system it called RescuePro to help manage equipment breakdowns. When a driver calls into the company's Road Rescue team, RescuePro documents the process. RescuePro over the past half-decade has become the basis of Aim's entire Road Rescue operation, and over that time the makeup of Aim's customer base changed. Transportation became more culturally diverse, and a new generation of customers gravitated away from picking up the phone to make calls.
"So, we've usually struggled when we would have a driver call in an emergency situation that wasn't very fluid in English. So having the ability to use that text app, he can talk to us in whatever his native tongue is, and we can translate it through the system and get it back to him," said Steve Shacklock, Aim's director of maintenance. "That's helped dramatically because it doesn't delay. There's no struggle (to communicate)."
Shacklock added that smoothing the communication also takes some of the tension out of an already tense situation.
"The driver's already frustrated when he's broke down alongside of the road. The last thing you want for him to do is not be able to communicate, and it's no fault of his own. It's just the nature of the industry right now."
It's also GPS-enabled, helping locate the driver when they otherwise might not know exactly where they are. "We can use that to pinpoint his location and get service out to him faster," Shacklock said.
Technology can be a scary thing, so while Aim is all in on the capability of its Navigator app, Aim Chief Information Officer and Vice President of Information Technology John Reed said the company will let its customers dictate how they want to receive communication. Roughly 10%-plus of the inbound service requests are currently coming through the app.
"We still get faxes," he laughed.
"You can still call into the 1-800 number," added Shacklock. "I would like to see at least 80% of our volume through Road Rescue come through the app, and the reason is just for trackability. I can pull a report and see how many people are using the app and the time it takes them to respond. There's a lot of data that comes from just them opening that app and putting in the information. We can't force everybody to go to the app. They still have the ability to pick up the phone, but if we can push the stuff that's coming through the Road Rescue department into the app, that will help better the calls that are coming in because we can work it from both sides."
Internal accountability
There's also a bread crumb trail for agents who didn't field the original call so they can handle follow ups knowing where the previous conversation ended.
"There's a page on our internal web portal that they use to manage the text communication. So they're looking at it on a webpage, but it's going text to the phone," said Aim Transportation Solutions Vice President of Software Development Dan Kellgren. "One of the Road Rescue agents can be working on it and end of the shift comes and they leave. The next person comes in and they just pick right up where they left off. If Steve wants to go in and see what are they saying to this driver or what the driver is saying back, he can read the entire conversation. He could even interject if he wanted to."
That so much of the data is populated by the driver, or already pre-populated based on what Aim knows about the user, the app also slashes input errors.
"Once they put their unit number in and send it to us, the team – when they get it to Road Rescue – it's already pre-populated with, "This is a 2022 Freightliner; it's got this size tire; it's got all that right at their fingertips," Reed said. "That really makes it a lot simpler than the whole phone call and the agent typing as the driver is talking."
Anyone with children of texting age has likely struggled at some point to make sense of an alphabet soup of seemingly random letters: HBU? WYD? LMK. Each of those mean something ... if you know what they mean.
"You can transfer it over to a live call at any point," added Shacklock.
Because agents can connect the info they get from the app with other maintenance systems, it helps service technicians troubleshoot potential solutions faster, too. The vehicle's service history doesn't come through the app, but it does through Aim's maintenance management system. When Aim creates a VRMS code through the work order, and it's had one within the last 60 days, it'll automatically flag, "and that can tell if the coordinator calls the service manager, 'Hey, this truck's down again.' We can go in and look to see what failed last time," Shacklock said. "Because if we have a truck overheating, and we just replaced thermostats in it and it didn't fix it, then we know we need to go somewhere else in the system."
Benefit for English speakers, too
While the app does almost all the heavy lifting to bridge the gap between two of the 7,000-plus languages on the globe, it does have some benefit for English-to-English communication, too.
"In your life, how many times have you been placed on hold and had to listen to that music," Shacklock asked. "With today's technology, a lot more people are going to text and go into apps. When you initiate (the Aim Navigator chat), it automatically starts a countdown timer, and it changes our application screen red. That incentivizes us to get back to that app and that message quicker."
Shacklock said app-based communication has reduced resolution times by upwards of 50%.
