Karma Automotive LLC is a Southern California–based luxury electric vehicle manufacturer dedicated to crafting unforgettable driving experiences through design, innovation, and performance. The team adopted BeyondTrust Remote Support to enable seamless remote communication and create a consistent repair experience across all dealer partners.
By John Albinson, After-Sales Director, and Alex Shaffer, IT Supervisor at Karma Automotive
When someone buys a luxury car, they expect the service to be just as high-quality as the car itself. Dealers feel the same way. They want fast answers, clear advice, and support that feels personal and close by.
That’s what we deliver at Karma Automotive, a luxury car manufacturer specializing in high-end, small-batch vehicles. Partnering with dealers across the U.S., Canada, Europe, South America, and Israel, we follow strict “fixed-first-time” guidelines to ensure our customers get their cars repaired correctly and returned quickly. Because of these standards, our technical support team for dealers must have the necessary tools to respond quickly, from anywhere, as we help to identify a vehicle’s issue and support the on-site technician in executing the solution.
It’s a white-glove experience from start to finish, and it must be consistent across all our dealer partners, regardless of location. The ability to be present, even when we’re not physically there, is essential to maintaining our high standard—and it all comes down to using the right technology.
Even though we wanted to deliver this high-quality experience from afar, we didn’t have a way to confirm what was happening at each dealership. Sometimes, on-site technicians would send unclear or incomplete details, increasing the risk of miscommunication and mistakes.
Without complete visibility into the dealership’s diagnostic tools or the vehicle in front of the technician, our team had to rely on educated guesses. The uncertainty and hesitation slowed the diagnostic process. It also became harder for us to confidently guide the technicians in solving issues.
Given these limitations, travel became our backup plan. If we couldn’t effectively help the technicians remotely, someone would physically go to the dealership and inspect the vehicle in person. More than being inconvenient, it was expensive, time-consuming, and pulled our resources away from supporting other dealers.
We had a global network depending on our team, but the lack of visibility made it impossible to work as quickly and accurately as the job required.
In 2019, Karma went through some structural changes that resulted in a new overlap with the existing IT team. They were already having success using the BeyondTrust Remote Support solution for internal employee support, so we decided to expand its use to address our remote service headaches for the team supporting technicians at our partner dealerships.
Remote Support offered access to remote control and screen-sharing features that would allow us to scale support effectively. With the ability to connect to a user’s computer or a technician’s laptop, we've gained direct, real-time access to their operational technology, along with diagnostic tools that interface with the vehicle's onboard systems. Suddenly, we could remotely monitor and control the diagnostic procedures being run on the physical car, ensuring complex, high-voltage, or proprietary systems were handled correctly. We have all of the data we needed at our fingertips, eliminating the need to relay information while hoping nothing got lost in translation.
As we learned more about the platform, we noticed some additional benefits:
Reliability. We've never had outages or lost connections, no matter how long we engage with a user’s device. For a small team supporting dealers worldwide, this stability makes us much more effective.
Flexibility to fit our workflows. We can remote into devices on or off the network, transfer files, work in the background with Command Prompt or PowerShell, and see exactly what the technician is seeing. We no longer have to rely on someone to describe something, increasing the potential for inaccuracy, and we can guide them to a fix in real time.
Enhanced security for our IT & OT teams. Karma’s cybersecurity engineering team strongly recommended the platform because of the built-in protections, including granular roles, permissions, and session policies. Remote Support audits every session, and by enforcing least privilege, we can ensure technicians have just the right amount of access needed for their tasks. This is critical when connecting to operational environments like diagnostic equipment, as it prevents unauthorized changes.
Cloud capabilities. While our implementation of the solution is currently on-premises, its consistent reliability has been a key factor as Karma Automotive plans to migrate to a cloud-based environment sometime next year.
Just as BeyondTrust helps us better serve our dealerships, their team is always ready to help ours. Everyone, from our account rep to the renewal team, makes themselves available to us. They listen to concerns and come back with resolutions. What developed is a partnership that we can rely on every day, year after year.
"Everyone, from our account rep to the renewal team, makes themselves available to us. They listen to concerns and come back with resolutions. What developed is a partnership that we can rely on every day, year after year.”
—John Albinson, After-Sales Director, Karma Automotive
The ability to resolve issues remotely with BeyondTrust Remote Support has saved us days of downtime and, in one year alone, more than $600,000 in warranty labor costs. Since we rarely need to fly people out to dealerships to assess vehicles anymore, we’ve saved a fortune in travel—probably 90% of our travel budget.
The biggest impact of BeyondTrust Remote Support has been the speed. Instead of waiting for more details or going back and forth with technicians, we can log in and see the situation immediately. Most of the time, we respond within minutes, not hours, which prevents bottlenecks and allows customers to get back on the road faster.
Remote Support also makes us more accurate. By seeing the technician’s diagnostic laptop directly, we don’t have to guess. Instead, we can confidently walk technicians through the right steps to repair the issue, keeping everyone aligned with our “fixed-first-time” approach.
"Since we can resolve issues remotely with Remote Support, we rarely need to fly people out to dealerships to assess vehicles anymore. We’ve saved a fortune in travel—probably 90% of our travel budget.”
—Alex Shaffer, IT Supervisor, Karma Automotive
With BeyondTrust, distance is no longer something to work around. We’re “in” a dealership within minutes, even if it’s thousands of miles away. For a small team supporting a global network, that presence has changed everything about how we work. BeyondTrust has enabled us to deliver the level of service our brand promises, regardless of dealer location or time zone. Companies tend to cut back on tech when times get tough, but BeyondTrust Remote Support has become so vital to us that losing it would be like cutting us off at the knees. It lets us be where we’re most needed, and that has become essential to how we support our vehicles and our customers around the world.
“Remote Support has become so vital to our work that losing it would be like cutting us off at the knees.”
—Alex Shaffer, IT Supervisor, Karma Automotive
