Digital First thinking helps JK Tyres reinvent tyre warranty claim process for better customer experience

Tyre warranties provide consumers protection against premature wear, material defects, and even road hazards. The adjustment on new tyre purchase against old defective tyres are based on defect type & remainder usable life of the old tyre.

The typical claims process at JK Tyres would beging with the consumer reaching out dealership with defective Tyres followed by Inspection by JKT service engineers visiting dealer counters providing their assessments by physically inspecting the tyres. Post inspection, Service Engineers would key in their findings in the SAP based Claim Management System and new tyres would be billed in the system to dealers. The entire process had a turnaround time of 3-7 Days with manual interventions that were subject to the capabilities of Service Engineers.

With the objective of improving customer experience and cutting down Turn Around Times and for Claim disposition & eliminating manual interventions in the process, JK Tyres team built a Native Mobile App ( Both Andriod & iOS) on SAPHANA Cloud for their Dealers/Distributors. The application now allows them to register the claims digitally. The app has the provision for capturing the images of the defective Tyre in a pre-defined format. The images thus captured are relayed to a Tensor Flow based ML/AI engine using EML (External Machine Learning) capability of SAP HANA Enterprise to predict the reason of failure with a clear disposition of acceptance / rejection along with defect type. This disposition is immediately made available to dealer/distributor in real time to settle the claim with the customer at the counter. The images captured are stored in SAP DMS for further retraining the model.

If the accuracy is less than 95% a notification is sent to the service engineer for double checking the defect reason in SAP FIORI based application hosted on SAP HANA Cloud.

This new process has cut down the turn around time for warranty claims from 3-7 days to one hour. The initiative came very handy in during the COVID-19 lockdowns while there were limitations of manpower, commuting restrictions and travel budgets were tightly controlled

The significance of this initiative was articulated very well by Srinivasu Allaphan, Sales & Marketing Director at JK Tyres, “ This is a revolutionary, path breaking digital disruptor functionality introduced by JKTIL to take on the competition. We surpassed the market expectations by several notches. Now this application has become a benchmark offering by JKTIL vis-à-vis not only competitors but also the complete Automobile sector. It shall further help us to capture the market share with a clear focus on JK Customer First vision”.

Besides improving the overall experiences of JK Tyres’ customers and dealers, this transformation strongly underlines how digital first thinking can have profound impact on business outcomes.