TruVideo announced Dobbs Truck Group has signed on to use their solution in their 25 truck dealership locations to prevent damage claims through their service departments, as well as streamline communication with customers.

TruVideo is a conversational commerce platform that uses text and video to help truck dealerships streamline communications. By using smart lines to offer things like service inspections, sales walkarounds, estimates, approvals, and payments, trucking companies are able to not only find additional efficiencies for their staff, but also increase their effective labor rate hours.

Dobbs has found that using TruVideo to record a video walkaround of each truck before it has entered the repair shop has resulted in a time-stamped video that proves the condition of the truck before it has been released to the customer. In this way, the company is protecting itself from loss claims that may happen after the truck leaves a Dobbs location.

“If TruVideo does nothing but prevents one loss, it's worth the investment,” said Jonathan Gipson, director of dervice at Dobbs Truck Group. “We have seen a pickup in our efficiency. With TruVideo, we are now able to get more time approved because customers see it. And they're not as apt to question the quote that we're providing.”

Dobbs said it has found the immediacy of texting among their team, paired with the transparency that results from a picture of the work that has been done, has streamlined their internal communication and sped up the approval process from their service customers.

“With TruVideo, we just simply take a video showing the area of the damage, and we upload that to the warranty case with everything they need to support that," said Gipson. "It really makes the back and forth between our centralized warranty department and our service managers that much more efficient. Our warranty team can send a request to a service advisor or directly to the technician and say, 'Hey, could you go take  a picture or video of this?' And then that technician or service advisor can just simply send it back and we have everything we need."

While Dobbs use of TruVideo has helped guard against loss, the company found the nature of video communication had an added benefit of increased labor hours due to a more streamlined approval process. By showing the customer a video or texting a photo, trust was established, leading to more approved hours.

“One thing that we have noticed just in the south, we sold 8800 hours of labor. Our average for last year was 6400. We have not added any technicians," said Gipson. "That's just been from capitalizing more on what we already had coming into our business because the RO count has been basically flat. I feel like we're getting more sold time also because it just makes it easier for the customer to approve it."