CLM in automotive company

Automobile holding with dealerships in Eastern Europe, specializing in the sale, warranty and service of cars, as well as the supply of spare parts.

The car sales business has been experiencing a lot of negative trends over the last few years. This is caused both by the emergence of new players with lower prices and the decline in profitability of the automobile industry as a whole. Simply selling cars is no longer a guarantee of profitability. In the 21st century, any business must work first and foremost with data and understand how to subsequently monetize that data. To this end, holding began using the SAP Marketing solution, which allowed the company to aggregate data from online and offline sources, forming a single customer profile, and automate marketing interaction with customers. 

Task:

The process of managing marketing campaigns in the holding company was not automated and centralized. Dealership centers often organized promotions and events on their own, and interacted with client databases. This led to confusion and inconvenience for the client.

In addition, the specificity of holding is that the company does not just sell cars, but helps clients choose and comfortably own a car. The starting point for the holding company is the customer, not his car.

At the beginning of his journey, the customer does not have a car: he looks for one, takes test drives, studies different models. Then he buys a car, starts servicing it and, after a while, thinks about either upgrading or buying a second car for the family. All this can take place either in communication with one dealership or with several, sometimes in several countries. The holding company's job is to ensure that each of these steps is comfortable, which means collecting and interacting effectively with customer data, which is impossible without a unified and centralized marketing management system.

In 2018, the marketing department decided to review the customer interaction processes at the holding company. Prior to that, each dealership interacted with its customers independently. The process was not systematic and uncontrollable, and required a lot of resources.

To solve these problems, it was decided to implement a centralized CLM (Customer Lifecycle Management) system. SAP Marketing was chosen as the platform for this project.

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Solution:

Company has implemented a unified system for managing the customer lifecycle at the holding company.

The company collects all available data about the customer into a single profile. That includes personal data he leaves, data on preferred communication channels, managers' interaction experience with the client, finances, and preferences.

Based on the collected data, holding can segment clients by various criteria to make relevant offers for them afterwards. SAP Marketing allows you to create different levels of segmentation and get the right target groups.

Company doesn't just segment the customer base. By combining the segmentation and evaluation functionality we have implemented RFM analysis (Recency, Frequency, and Money) which allows you to monitor in a convenient time interval (day/week/month) the changes in the customer base structure. And that's not all. Implementation of RFM-analysis has allowed the company to build the rules of communication and become even more flexible in terms of communication with our clients.

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Results:

Implementation: