At Saab we started our CRM journey about three years ago, in the spring of 2000, but it did not at all start as a CRM project. After several years of increasing marketing investments, using traditional mass communication methods, we had not achieved the results we had hoped for. As a small niche player in the highly competitive global car industry, we simply did not have the size necessary to cut through the media, cluttered with mass advertising by all our much larger competitors. We therefore decided to take a new look at our entire marketing strategy, but this time try to turn our small size into a strength, not a weakness.
Saab has a well defined target group of affluent and progressive consumers who avoid mainstream product choices. They are well educated and regard themselves as somewhat of connoisseurs. Saab’s combination of performance, design, innovation, and of course safety has struck a cord with this group, and we already sold well to people with this particular socio-demographics, but we still needed to find a lot more of them.
The starting point in our strategy work was therefore to map out the ideal customer journey for this target audience. How did they want to experience the Saab brand? What should our communications be like in the different phases of the purchase funnel? What should the shopping and buying experience be like at the retail level? How could we gain their loyalty through the ownership cycle? We decided that the answers to these questions would guide our entire marketing strategy, making it truly customer focused. So what answers did we get?
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First of all, mass advertising is not a particularly effective method of communication with such a narrow target audience. We needed to shift resources from traditional mass communication, to more targeted communication, and to the internet, since this group are very high internet users.
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Secondly, we needed to work hard on improving the retail experience we offered these consumers. If our brand carried a premium message, that must also be reflected in our retail facilities, the car dealerships. Far too often that experience fell short of expectations.
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Thirdly, to execute our new relationship marketing plans, we needed to invest in an infrastructure that could support it. That meant not only new CRM software and customer databases to achieve that elusive 360-view of the customer, but also call center facilities that could deliver consistently excellent customer service, and also be leveraged for one-to-one communications, lead management etc.
Last but not least, we needed to re-think how our products were packaged. The car industry has always focused on “moving the metal”, but today there are so much more associated with car ownership than just the metal. You need financing, service, maintenance, insurance, taxes, replacement parts etc. If we could bundle all of these services in simple convenient packages together with the car, we would make life easier for our consumers, while selling more services to them.
So if these were the answers to our strategic questions, what did we do about them. Well, the Saab marketing mix looks quite different today, than it did three years ago. Some critical resources were reallocated from advertising over to relationship marketing. We created specific plans and materials for prospect dialogue and customer dialogue. These are ongoing process-driven communication plans, rather than ad-hoc campaigns, designed to maximize the number of highly qualified leads we can generate for our dealer network, and to ensure a high degree of brand loyalty once we have convinced the consumer to buy their first Saab. We use tools such as the Saab Welcome Package to new owners, the Saab Magazine, the Saab-i digital newsletter, Saab World – our product magazine aimed at prospects, etc. At the same time, the internet has become one of our most important communication channels, and definitely the most important, when it comes to generating qualified leads.
The work with our dealer network has been equally important. Over the past two years we have convinced hundreds of our retail partners around the world to invest in both upgrading their facilities to better reflect Saab’s premium brand, but also in training their staff in better customer service and pro-active consultative selling. We have introduced innovative new ownership packages such as Saab Variations, where you can switch cars twice a year, for a convertible in the summer, and a wagon in the winter for example. Or Saab Simplicity, where all the essential services associated with car ownership is bundled into one convenient package. We have also worked closely with our dealers to better integrate them in our marketing efforts. We produce local integrated marketing plans for the dealers, and we work constantly with them on lead management to ensure a high quality follow-up of the consumer leads our marketing activities generate.
When all this work kicked off in 2000 we realized that a strong CRM infrastructure was a critical success factor to be able to execute all of our new relationship marketing programs. We therefore hired some CRM talent from outside the car industry to guide us through this process. We then tackled the two components of the infrastructure in parallel: the call centers and the IT systems. In our eight largest markets we established new integrated local call centers called CIC, Customer Interaction Centers. They were fully integrated with our national sales companies in each market, and they not only handled the traditional customer service function, but also outbound contacts and marketing responses. The CIC really became the communication hub in our CRM structure.
On the system side we implemented one global CRM system, called Saab TouchPoint, based on Siebel software, in the same top eight markets where we already had established the CICs. We consolidated numerous isolated customer and prospect databases into one single instance, and we built new interfaces between the sales systems and the customer database, so we could capture accurate customer data at the source. We wanted TouchPoint to cover as many of the potential customer touchpoints as possible, starting with the CIC contacts, then lead management process all the way out to the retail channel, as well as outbound marketing communications. As far as systems projects go, it was far from flawlessly executed, but we did successfully implement the core functionality in all eight markets, to achieve one consolidated view of our customer data.
We have a much stronger dealer network today, that better reflect Saab’s premium image in the marketplace. We have a solid CRM infrastructure in place, to leverage and build from, with one global consolidated customer and prospect database. We have one of the best lead management processes in the car industry, quickly forwarding qualified leads to the dealers, and with a high follow-up rate. We have successfully launched two new products in the last year, the 9-3 SportSedan and the 9-3 Convertible, and sales are up. I must believe that our brand strategy, solidly built on CRM principles had something to do with that. And yes, we still do some advertising too...