When commercial truck dealers need answers, they turn to the General Motors Medium-Duty Business Center. The facility, which opened July 6, 1999, is a centralized call center which replaces an earlier, de-centralized system.

The Medium-Duty Business Center is open 254 days per year from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. EST for dealer sales and service support, so that it is in alignment with most business hours.

The center is structured like most commercial dealerships, with specific support departments for sales, bid assistance, sales engineering, distribution, service support, product technical assistance, and parts support for GM medium-duty trucks.

"Dealers call one toll-free number and are given a choice of seven areas they can go to, each one manned by specialists in their field," said AI Tandrup, the center's sales and service manager. "Our business center team has 550 years of accumulated experience in the commercial truck industry. Because of their collective wealth of knowledge in this industry, we are achieving our original goal of being able to respond quickly to nearly every call."

The new Medium-Duty Business Center replaces a previous support line started during the 1980s. The earlier call center was staffed by two people who took messages from dealers and routed them internally at GM to try and find answers, compared to the new business center's 30 employees.

Since its inception, the center has averaged 300 incoming calls per day. Nearly 50 percent of the callers have requested general sales information, and about 25 percent have asked for information regarding truck distribution.

The remaining questions have focused on technical, general service, truck application, and parts requests. The center is also averaging 300 outgoing calls a day to support inquiries and make dealership contracts.

"If you add up the numbers, you can see that we are making a tremendous amount of contact with our dealerships," Tandrup said. "That is very positive and will in the end help them provide better service to their customers."

After completing the center's first quality survey, GM found that 98 percent of its dealers who have already contacted the center were pleased overall. In addition, all survey respondents said support staff members were helpful and answered questions quickly.

"Commercial truck customers rely on the dealerships for support," said Tandrup. "If we do our job by building a relationship with the dealers, it makes the dealers more effective with their customers."