Toyota Astra Motor (TAM), a 50-50 joint venture between Toyota Motor Corporation and Indonesian conglomerate PT Astra International has developed an innovative customer data platform, improving conversion of leads to car sales and enhanced operational efficiency with cloud.
The company has also experienced a 50 percent increase in quality customer leads.
TAM's research and data centre department head, Hendra Syahputra said the company could achieve better profitability through a 4 percent increase in converting leads to car purchases and boost competitive edge through 20 percent improvement in time required to convert leads into a sales.
He added that the firm has enhanced operational efficiencies with 11.9 percent reduction in cost of obtaining customer leads.
Established in 1971, TAM offers vehicles including city car, hybrid car, hatchback, multi-purpose vehicle and others sport utility vehicles and commercial trucks.
The company wanted to enhance collaboration with its network of more than 325 dealerships, expand customer base and improve revenue margins.
It also planned to capture previously overlooked business opportunities, by working with dealers with direct access to customer leads.
TAM said it was essential to combine data systems and workflows for efficient marketing.
It worked with customer experience management firm Merkle to develop a customer data platform (CDP) on Google Cloud.
Improved performance
With the new CDP, TAM said it could gain better cloud flexibility in contrast to the previous solution that bundled features, where it needed to pay upfront for the bundling with some non-essential features.
"Google Cloud lets us pick and choose the features based on our requirements, allowing us to reinvest these costs towards building the customer data platform," Syahputra said.
TAM also needed its CDP to integrate offline and online customer journeys.
This could be achieved through a rich lead information and targeted audience segmentation, based on demographics, preferences and spending behaviours.
It used Cloud Composer to optimise data integration from dealerships and various other sources including website and app navigation.
TAM said the CDP ecosystem of Cloud Composer, Google Analytics 4, BigQuery, and Display & Video 360 also optimised the platform for more curated marketing.
For instance, Google Analytics 4 enabled the company to monitor consumer behaviour across websites and apps, such as viewed content and time spent on a page.
Since it was fully integrated with BigQuery, this data could be used for real-time data analytics and to identify potential audience segments.
Syahputra said the cloud-based CDP seamlessly interacted with on-premise environment, creating a unified customer experience.
On the future plans, he said TAM intends to facilitate the real-time integration of data and services with its dealership network through Google Cloud's Apigee to automate and scale the management of APIs.
He added that this will be applied "beyond" the sales process to enhance the use of data across tasks from sales service, compliances and through customer lifecycle.
TAM is also planning to monitor driver behavioural patterns in real time through Google Maps to enhance its vision of a total mobility solution that includes timely insight on maintenance and servicing needs.
