PacLease, the full-service truck rental and leasing division for Kenworth and Peterbilt trucks, has strengthened its emergency roadside assistance program, PacCentral. The program is evolving into a proactive service to reduce and keep downtime to a minimum for PacLease customers, the company says.

“With remote diagnostics that have been provided in our customers’ vehicles since 2015, we’re able to not only get the fault code, but also information on what’s happening with the vehicle,” explained Jake Civitts, PacLease’s director of franchise operations. “Remote diagnostics can tell us if it’s safe for our customer to continue on to a nearby service location, or if the truck needs to be shut down immediately. There is so much more visibility now and our Call Center can help coordinate the proper course of action for our customers such as locate the most appropriate service center, make sure the replacement parts are available and a trained technician is on stand by and ready to work on your truck. And that means PacLease is able to triage the truck fast—getting our customer back on the road as soon as possible.”

When drivers operating pre-2015 PacLease units call the PacCentral Call Center, the diagnostics and course of action are often handled in a conference call. “Our operators are trained to handle the top driver questions–such as how to manually re-gen the DPF,” said Civitts. “More complex issues are remedied by bringing in a service tech if the truck needs assistance and it’s not a quick fix over the phone. Once we receive the call, we pinpoint where our customer’s truck is located and determine the closest PacLease service location. Since we have more than 1,100 PacLease and other service locations in North America, the distances are often pretty close. We then get the location’s service tech on the line to help determine the problem and course of action. In the event the truck is driven or towed to that location, that service rep is ready to begin the repair process.”