TBC Corporation client reference video

TBC implements IBM Worklight software, which enables the company to write a single instance of code that can be deployed on multiple mobile device platforms, such as Android and Mac iOS. TBC can now deliver a consistent user experience across multiple mobile devices faster while using fewer development resources.

Video Transcript

John Capriotti, vice president, ecommerce and web, TBC Corporation
Steven Smith, senior vice president and chief information officer, TBC Corporation


John Capriotti: TBC Corporation is one of the nation’s leaders in automotive service and certainly the largest vertically integrated tire organization in the country, manufacturing and distributing tires to our wholesale clients as well as our retail brands.

Steven Smith: Today, we are a $3.6 billion corporation and the number one retailer with over 4000 locations in North America and 13 countries. About five years ago, we established a technology strategy roadmap and wherein we wanted to shift from tires to service and so everything from our technology to our acquisition strategy and our talent development was really centered round that strategy.

We realized that we needed to reinvent ourselves and we needed to transform not only our technology and the way we sold but also interaction with consumer. We wanted to create this air of transparency, trust and confidence in our automotive services and our products
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John Capriotti: The trust that we expect to engage our customers with requires consistency across touch points. We are using technology to assist us in the development of that trust and harmony, specifically with the development of custom point-of-sale applications that allow our retail associates to have a common experience with customers.

Steven Smith: And so what we wanted to do is completely change that experience, remove those barriers and create an environment and an application that had this kind of consistent what we call a connected experience from the web all the way into the store.

John Capriotti: Mobility is key to our strategy for connected customer experience across all channels. We spend a considerable amount of time a year actually with our customers understanding how they would like to use devices and what we can provide through mobile experience to make their lives easier, better, faster around their automotive services. And we selected the Worklight product specifically to deliver on the experiences that we’ve designed as a result of that research. Our mobile application portfolio requires complete flexibility of the UI, so that we can address customer needs in our user experience with complete and total control. And the Worklight platform allows us to manage that through standard web development technologies like HTML5 and CSS3. That gives us complete control of the application and the customer experience, and that’s incredibly important to us. The development of a consistent user experience regardless of device is very challenging, unless you have a product that truly can manage a single code base and push it to different devices consistently in a way that preserves the integrity of the user experience, and Worklight provides that.

Steven Smith: We are already seeing anywhere between a 10% to 15% jump in our retail sales through this kind of transparent relationship with our consumers.

John Capriotti: About three and a half years ago, we had 15% to 20% of our visitors to our web properties coming through mobile devices. Today, that’s closer to 40%, and that continues to grow every single month. We are embracing the socialization of marketing and customer experience in a way that allows us to create trust with customers by listening and participating in the experience of maintaining a vehicle in a way that doesn’t feel like sales because it isn't.

Steven Smith: This transformation for us was about reinventing the consumer experience, reinventing how the automotive aftermarket industry vertical delivers services and products. It was driven from the top down from a strategic vision of transforming our business with the hope, the wish, the desire to see increased profitability and revenue generation. If I look at this journey, and it really is a journey, there isn’t a destination point, this is going to be an evolving and continual process but if you understand where you are going and you plan and you staff and you partner appropriately, you are going to find yourself at a situation where you are going to hit success.