India’s automotive manufacturer Mahindra & Mahindra has started providing a personalised omnichannel experience to customers by automating their journey with the company using Salesforce.
It has united over 18,000 dealerships across the country and over 400 call centre agents on a single platform.
Mahindra’s Chief Digital Officer Bhuwan Lodha said the project worked on three key imperatives to deliver connected experiences, simplify customer interactions and future-proof business.
“We could manage the entire customer journey from marketing and lead nurturing, to test-drive scheduling and car bookings with Salesforce, ensuring a smooth experience,” he added.
Mahindra had a limited customer relationship management (CRM) system that could not integrate with their campaign management tools or core dealer management systems (DMS). This has led to failed attempts for customers trying to reach a call centre or an appropriate dealer.
A lack of centralisation and misalignment between dealer-run marketing campaigns and those by internal teams, had resulted in poor customer communications. This also affected the core DMS, suffering frequent downtime, Lodha said
The team had looked for an easily configurable CRM platform that would unite all dealers around the customer on a cloud-first scalable approach.
“Salesforce helped us connect customer interactions across touchpoints into one seamless experience and provide a 360-degree customer view,” he added.
Customer benefits
Using the integration platform MuleSoft, Mahindra has integrated Salesforce with its customer portal and DMS to enable a smooth flow of leads, killing downtime issues.
“Website leads flow smoothly into the Salesforce Marketing Cloud where teams can personalise prospect journeys, and automate communications,” Lodha said.
The manufacturer could now track a customer’s preferred communication mode and also drive omnichannel engagements.
Mahindra also uses Marketing Cloud Advertising to create targeted ads at scale on digital platforms. It gains marketing insights on campaign performance with the Marketing Cloud Intelligence platform.
It has also built a custom sales review process on Sales Cloud that manages dealership reporting structures.
For instance, if a dealer or sales consultant needs help closing a sale, the system alerts Mahindra’s area sales managers for assistance, said Lodha.
Mahindra uses CRM Analytics to equip sales managers with real-time insights on sales pipelines, dealer performance, enquiries per dealer and more. These metrics guide dealers to improve their performance, and offer customers a consistent and personalised experience.
Additionally, with Salesforce Service Cloud, Mahindra’s call centre agents are able to resolve customer cases faster and more effectively.
Dealer focus
With artificial intelligence technology CRM Einstein, Mahindra teams could differentiate high scoring to optimise agent efforts.
These leads flow to dealers through a dealer portal built on the Salesforce Experience Cloud.
Lodha explained that such automation have reduced response time by 50 percent from 30 minutes to 15 minutes, improving the opportunity ratio by almost 10 percentage points.
For instance, one of Mahindra’s dealership’s ‘enquiry to test drive’ conversion rate has improved from approximately 40 percent to 70 percent by real-time insights.
Mahindra plans to enhance monitoring and also make more dealership processes mobile-friendly.
It expects to deploy in other automotive segments and businesses as well.
The company is now gearing up to roll out its new range of electric cars investing in artificial intelligence and machine learning to transform customer interactions.
