Interview with MSX International: Driving Employee Performance in the Automotive Industry

MSX’s mission is to focus on helping their clients generate more value for their customers. MSX has been a dedicated partner for over 25 years for leading automotive brands around the world by supporting business transformations, and managing operations across customer experience, repair optimization, learning and insights.  

MSX selected Centrical as a partner and tool to support and further drive their mission of helping their clients generate more value for their customers.  

Madeleine Freind, Centrical’s Vice President of Customer Success sat down with Deborah Mulholland, Director of Learning Solutions, MSX to share more about how MSX found Centrical, why they selected Centrical, the success they have seen since launch, and what’s ahead.  

Madeleine: What were the challenges you were facing that made you select Centrical? 

Deborah: The challenges that we were facing that brought us to Centrical were really finding the right technology solutions that could be flexible and adaptable to our own clients’ needs in providing them tech-enabled learning solutions that were more: 

• Cutting edge 
• Gamified based rewards  
• Recognition based tools  

That would enable us to improve the delivery of our own content through a more modern current engaging customer platform, but that we didn’t have in-house in our own portfolio. And we didn’t want to invest in building those ourselves. So, we went on the search for the right partner to be able to bring those solutions to our clients. 

Madeleine: Why did you select Centrical? 

Deborah: The basic features of the platform at first glance appeared to be what we were looking for, so that was the starting point. The main players though were the fact that one of our colleagues in a very small fashion had implemented a Centrical solution in another part of the world and was a very, very strong proponent of it and a strong refer of the company.  

Once we started speaking with you at Centrical, we realized that you had the same philosophy about customers that we do and clients. Very customer-focused, very responsive, very willing to roll your sleeves up and dive in and come up with the right solution for our client, and that was important to us because that’s really what we stake our reputation on.  

We felt that Centrical really seemed to be philosophically and in terms of client centricity a good match for our own culture. 

Madeleine: You researched other gamification and learning platforms, and you went down a path with them before you chose Centrical. How does Centrical compare to some of the other platforms you have either used or looked at? 

Deborah: I’ve looked at several gamification platforms in the past. Where I see Centrical standing out competitively is that you have a strong product roadmap. The other platform we were using and trying to pilot wasn’t as progressive in how they were evolving.  

They had a good set of features that had value, but you didn’t see how that was going to continue to push the envelope and go forward. Centrical has done a really good job of building a product roadmap and listening to feedback and really considering where do they want the product to be to stay ahead of the competition going forward. 

The data-driven and performance-driven learning aspect is strong. I love that it can absorb outside metrics and internal to the system performance and meld those two into a way that allows us to intelligently improve. That’s a strong feature. 

From the overall partnership standpoint. The customer service focus from Centrical is head and shoulders above the competitor that we were working with. The ability to truly be a partner and to listen to our clients and to be flexible and responsive has really come through. That makes us want to continue the partnership and keep finding more opportunities to do this together because it is a win-win situation.  

Madeleine: What kind of impact has Centrical driven for your business and for your customer Hyundai’s business? 

Deborah: The impact that Centrical’s driven is still in the early stages. It has given, our client Hyundai, trust in us to be able to take them forward in this realm of employee engagement and learning.  

The more immediate impact is it has given us intelligence into what is happening with the learners that will allow us to make better business decisions and to perform better for our clients by helping them improve their results.  

We didn’t have that insight before because we didn’t have the information, we didn’t have the data. The analytics that are part of the platform is giving us the benchmarking and the insight to make better decisions and to really improve their business case out for them. 

Madeleine: What are you most excited about for our future together? Both immediately and then longer term? 

Deborah: What am I most excited about? A few things. Now that we have a clear understanding of Centrical within our business model, and we see where your product roadmap is going, there’s so much opportunity that we believe is untapped with our own client base. Where we can add value and entrench ourselves better into those client relationships by bringing the Centrical solution in. By virtue of that, we will help sell more implementations of Centrical. 

It’s a win-win. We’ve gotten all those pieces in place to lay the foundation, and now it’s exciting because we get to take what we’ve learned and gain momentum going forward to do more with it.