Case study
Challenges■
- Improve Customer Services – independent poll suggested Mercedes Finance was the worst automotive finance service in the survey
- Reduce time taken to integrate with SAP
- Overcome some fundamental problems with their business processes to improve communication with dealers
- Drive CRM adoption beyond the credit control team
- Provide customer services with accurate information on vehicle finance quickly
- Effective CRM support
39
systems integrated
- Improve Customer Services – independent poll suggested Mercedes Finance was the worst automotive finance service in the survey
- Reduce time taken to integrate with SAP
- Overcome some fundamental problems with their business processes to improve communication with dealers
- Drive CRM adoption beyond the credit control team
- Provide customer services with accurate information on vehicle finance quickly
- Effective CRM support
39
systems integrated
“CRM-UK were incredibly pleasant to deal with, and installed everything with the minimum of fuss and disturbance. Developing our CRM system has transformed the way we deal with our customers. Most importantly our customers are happy with our improved service.“
Tony Thirlwall, IT Specialist – Business Change
Mercedes Finance IT
The solution■
Mercedes Finance decided to invest in CRM for customer services and the contracts department by procuring 130 CRM licences. The main project areas for Mercedes were:
Customisation
Vehicle-centric contact records using key fields to identify finance contracts and Mercedes dealer relationships – CRM-UK modified CRM to enable Mercedes Finance to e-mail the vehicle’s supplying dealer and record the history against the vehicle instead of the customer.
Integration
Custom fields are used to store information from SAP including information about the current status of the contract and information relating to settlements
Integration
Global calendar using a “pool” where customer service issues are located. Customer service agents take ownership of issues from the pool until the issue is resolved. This could include a customer requesting an early settlement.
Mercedes Finance implemented Inaport, a powerful data import utility from Inaplex CRM Integration. Inaport was initially developed for customers requiring complex import routines from many different sources including, in this case, SAP. Some advantages of using Inaport are:
Large range of connectors including SAP ODBC
The ability to create profiles that can be scheduled as tasks with Windows Task Scheduler
Complex indexing for field matching against very large tables
Mercedes Finance decided to invest in CRM for customer services and the contracts department by procuring 130 CRM licences. The main project areas for Mercedes were:
Customisation
Vehicle-centric contact records using key fields to identify finance contracts and Mercedes dealer relationships – CRM-UK modified CRM to enable Mercedes Finance to e-mail the vehicle’s supplying dealer and record the history against the vehicle instead of the customer.
Integration
Custom fields are used to store information from SAP including information about the current status of the contract and information relating to settlements
Integration
Global calendar using a “pool” where customer service issues are located. Customer service agents take ownership of issues from the pool until the issue is resolved. This could include a customer requesting an early settlement.
Mercedes Finance implemented Inaport, a powerful data import utility from Inaplex CRM Integration. Inaport was initially developed for customers requiring complex import routines from many different sources including, in this case, SAP. Some advantages of using Inaport are:
Large range of connectors including SAP ODBC
The ability to create profiles that can be scheduled as tasks with Windows Task Scheduler
Complex indexing for field matching against very large tables
The results■
39
systems integrated
Single Desktop Overview of customer information
SAP Integration reduced from a nightly 8 hours to half hourly