Improving Communication for Ultimate Quality Assurance

How Dufour Yachts uses PlanRadar to optimise its customer service and its quality processes

Dufour Yachts is a shipyard that manufactures monohull sailing boats. The French company has enjoyed strong growth since it was founded over 40 years ago and now has 400 employees in high season and a turnover of around 50 million euros. The brand’s quest for excellence is not only reflected in the quality of its boats but also in the support of its clients, throughout the whole lifecycle of the vessels. And this support is where PlanRadar plays its part, as the user-friendliness of the platform makes it possible for Dufour Yachts to foster a close and efficient relationship with its clients.

The challenge: avoiding wasted time and lost information

At Dufour Yachts, each boat is unique thanks to a painstaking customisation process. The work is bespoke, making quality assurance — which needs to be fast and precise — more difficult. Before Dufour Yachts discovered PlanRadar, the yacht company mainly communicated with its clients via email. But this approach was error-prone, and time-consuming too, negatively affecting the company’s reputation and work. Emails were sometimes lost if the project took several weeks to complete, and several highly complex projects needed to be managed in parallel. This led to clients, and the Dufour Yachts team themselves, often becoming somewhat frustrated.  

The solution: centralising information on a single platform

Maxime Baudry is the customer service manager at Dufour Yachts. For each sailing boat that is designed, Maxime and his team create a project in PlanRadar that matches the vessel, about two weeks before it leaves the shipyard. The quality department then uses the app to document the current condition of the boat before it leaves the works. The documentation is produced by creating tasks, photos and comments and the company is even considering using voice memos to add more detail to the tasks. Archiving this data creates real added value in this phase of the boat’s life cycle. 

In a second step, the customer service department takes on the administration of PlanRadar. The team primarily uses the platform as a tool for centralising data and for communicating with their clients. “Customer service employees spend about 80 to 90% of their time using PlanRadar”, says Baudry. 

The condition of the sailing boats is shared with the dealers, enabling the parties to continuously communicate with each other throughout the whole of the warranty period. Even after this period ends, Dufour Yachts keeps on providing top quality assurance for its customers. For example, they can quickly and easily communicate any spare parts that they require directly via the PlanRadar app at any time. 

The result: improved quality of work and significant time savings

Thanks to PlanRadar, the customer service team at Dufour Yachts have improved their quality of work by making information accessible on a single platform. Maxime Baudry also points out that the PlanRadar platform offers significant time savings, in particular by avoiding email traffic that can be protracted. As a result, Dufour Yachts is able to provide a better service to clients. Furthermore, the intuitive PlanRadar software means that new team members pick up the use of the platform very quickly. More than 2000 projects have been managed in PlanRadar since the company started using it and Maxime would like to expand the use of the platform in the future. In particular, he would like to use the statistics tool to identify trends, improve building processes or optimise the sales of spare parts. Great projects await Dufour Yachts and PlanRadar!