Auto Retail: How smart use of CRM can power post-Covid-19 bounce back

Businesses have endured Covid-19 for more than a year, and it seems that despite all the efforts, the situation will remain challenging for quite some time. It is unimaginable to have a low business year going forward. This is the story of two entrepreneurs; Jay, a first-generation businessman running a dealership for a popular motorcycle brand, and Esha, who manages a chain of auto dealerships.

Jay – Hi there Esha, it has been almost a year that we met, it would be nice to catch up.
Esha – Good you called; I have been looking forward to seeing you. Let us meet this Friday.
A few days later

Esha – It has been a tough year for us; in fact, we had to lay off some of our sales team, there were hardly any sales inquiries or walk-in.
In fact, our services business also has been severely impacted.
But I hear you did well, you should tell me about it.

Jay – Initially, I too, was quite apprehensive about how things unfolded. Luckily around January 2019, I had gone live with my new CRM system, and the best part is we have a trained CRM Champion – Gina. First, she ensured that all our workforce was fully prepared to use it, and later she is always around to discuss our business challenges and how those could be addressed using the CRM.

Esha – That sounds interesting.

Jay – Not just any CRM but one that captures the entire customer journey and has intelligent plugins. As soon as the Covid situation spread, the first thing that was impacted was the new sales. No one was coming out or thinking about spending on leisure stuff.

Then we faced the same challenge as you; service revenues began to dip. Here Gina pitched in and advised that since we could not do much with the new sales, we should focus on the services. With the customer 360 views from the CRM, she, along with our marketing team, devised a customer contact campaign that would run automatically and send emails to the customers. The customer could book a service through an embedded link in the mail.

This helped recover the services business to some extent, but the main problem was missed appointments. People would book but not show up. Here I decided to offer a complimentary scheduled pick-up and drop for the bikes.

That solved one problem but created another. Our limited inbound call capacity was creating a lot of frustration with the customers who were calling to find the status of the bikes.

Here Gina stepped in again and put together a Service ticket system in the CRM and linked it with our service job card system. This way, the customers would get automatic updates, and if any special approval were required from the customer to undertake any special job, that too was accorded digitally.

Esha – Wow, I did not know CRMs could be used in such a manner.

Jay – Wait, you have not heard the whole story yet.

Furthermore, Gina worked with our team to use our customer success stories to build a social media marketing campaign using CRM.

Esha – Really!! Tell me about it.

Jay – Yeah, so we put pictures of our customers receiving their serviced bikes on our FB and Instagram. That led to a positive viral reaction from other customers and their friends who are not our customers. The CRM picked all the contacts in the lead management, and using a trickle marketing campaign, we were able to convert them into our customers.

Since March, this year we are not only the No 1 in sales but also the most preferred service partner.

Esha – I am so amazed; you must ask Gina to come and meet us.

Jay – Sure, and she will take you through the entire process of value delivery. You can anytime have a firsthand experience by looking at how we are doing it.

For an in-depth discussion on how we at SimpleCRM can help you in enriching your end-to-end customer journey, contact us at sales@simple.works.