Salesforce.com, the market and technology leader in on-demand business services, has announced that Honda Australia Motorcycles & Power Equipment Pty Ltd (Honda MPE) has selected salesforce.com to manage all its customer, sales and marketing information.
Honda MPE Australia is one of the 35,300 companies of all sizes, industries and geographies that comprised the salesforce.com customer base as of July 31, 2007. Revenue and subscribers will be recognised as the service is delivered.
In operation since 1991, Honda MPE imports motorcycles, power equipment and outboard engines and assembles lawnmowers and brushcutters.
With annual sales in excess of 200,000 units representing over $350million of turnover, Honda estimates that it has more than 1 million Honda products currently in active use in Australia. .
Honda MPE will use Salesforce to better communicate with its Australian customers, as well as automatically track and manage marketing campaigns. With this insight, Honda will be able to target marketing campaigns like never before.
According to Craig Bassett, IT Manager at Honda MPE Honda wasn’t looking for an on-demand solution, but chose one after discovering how cost effective and easy to use Salesforce would be.
“That we don’t need to worry about managing the system on-premise is also a huge advantage,” Bassett says. “It frees up our IT staff because they don’t need to worry about software upgrades, disaster recovery or extra security.”
With Salesforce, Honda MPE wants to drive top and bottom line growth by evolving its marketing campaigns to a new level. As such, Honda MPE will implement a two-phase business strategy.
Phase one: Cleanse data to target marketing campaigns for growth
Honda MPE has a database of approximately one million contacts, but only around 250,000 of those are qualified.
Of the remaining 750,000, Honda MPE has little insight into details like their age, gender, occupation, customer purchase history, or even if the customer still owns a Honda MPE product.
Bassett had run direct mail and email marketing campaigns in the past, but was not sure he had targeted the right demographic, and had no way to measure the campaign’s success.
“We had used another system as our contact database, which was more than seven years old and too basic to give us the customer detail we needed,” he says.
“It didn’t have a marketing function, which is an area of the business we wanted to improve. Most data was out of date, and as a result the response rates on our marketing campaigns were low.”
“With Salesforce we’ll be able to clean up the data and validate each contact,” Bassett says.
Honda MPE will transfer all customer data over to Salesforce, and qualify every contact in the process. Once contacts are transferred, Honda MPE will be able to:
– Automatically record every customer touch point to keep records up to date;
– Track customer satisfaction levels and identify gaps in service delivery to take customer service to a new level;
– Track customer complaints for prompt follow-up;
– Update customer information online anywhere, anytime, so updates are immediately available for marketing and customer service departments;
– Understand and profile customers based on spend history to offer more tailored levels of service based on the type of customer;
– Integrate with other departments including Honda Australia Rider Training, Honda MPE’s motorcycle training division, and Honda Riders Club Australia, Honda MPE’s national members association, to leverage cross-department sales opportunities;
– Track service information on Honda products for a complete customer service history.
“The end goal for us is build unprecedented understanding of our customer base so we can continuously improve the way we communicate with them,” Bassett says.
Phase two: Improve customer service experience and measure campaign success for the first time
“Once we have clean data, we can use it to better market to our customers. We’ll be able to provide a better customer experience, so when they do contact us, we’ll know exactly who they are,” says Craig Bassett.
Honda MPE will launch targeted marketing campaigns from within Salesforce, and measure their success for the first time.
Honda MPE will also implement custom applications from the AppExchange, salesforce.com’s online marketplace for business applications. Honda MPE will implement:
• Clicktools: Honda MPE will use Clicktools to create custom online forms and surveys to send to customers for feedback on service levels.
• SMS for AppExchange: Honda MPE will be able to send and receive, report and analyse SMS communication from within Salesforce. This will be a fast way to notify customers of new and relevant offers as well as deal with time-sensitive issues such as product recalls.
• Computer Telephony Interface: Honda MPE will integrate its call centre with Salesforce using a custom Computer Telephony Interface. As calls come in, the name and company of each caller will automatically be brought up so staff can prepare and greet customers personally.
Honda MPE plans to have Salesforce up and running in a matter of months, and further customise the product with multiple interfaces next year.
Sqware Peg, salesforce.com’s premier Australian implementation partner, has been engaged to support their implementation.
“The beautiful thing about the on-demand model is how quickly it can be implemented. This means that we can focus on driving innovative business strategies as opposed to simply managing infrastructure,” says Bassett.
Force.com Platform and the AppExchange
Force.com reinvents the traditional development, deployment and distribution of any business application with Platform-as-a-Service. Developers, customers and partners can use Force.com to easily create a new generation of on-demand applications and deploy them worldwide as a service. Force.com allows applications to be easily shared, exchanged and installed with a few simple clicks via salesforce.com’s AppExchange marketplace, enabling all the innovation that Force.com unleashes to be easily distributed to the entire on-demand community.
The AppExchange economy continues to expand, with thousands of customers installing thousands of applications via the AppExchange. Customers of all sizes can quickly and easily extend Salesforce with additional on-demand business applications available on the AppExchange, found at http://www.salesforce.com/appexchange.
About salesforce.com
Salesforce.com is the market and technology leader in on-demand business services. The company’s Salesforce suite of on-demand CRM applications allows customers to manage and share all of their sales, support, marketing and partner information on-demand. Force.com, the world’s first on-demand platform, enables customers, developers and partners to build powerful new on-demand applications that extend beyond CRM to deliver the benefits of multi-tenancy and The Business Web across the enterprise. Force.com allows applications to be easily shared, exchanged and installed with a few simple clicks via salesforce.com’s AppExchange marketplace, available at http://www.salesforce.com/appexchange. Customers can also take advantage of Successforce, salesforce.com’s world-class training, support, consulting and best practices offerings.