SAP Solution Brief SAP for Automotive
CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT IN THE AUTOMOTIVE INDUSTRY
How to Gain a Competitive Edge by Knowing Your Customers and Transforming that Knowledge into Successful Marketing Strategies for Future Growth
The automotive industry faces significant challenges caused by frequent disconnects in communication between manufacturers, dealers, and end customers. The mySAP™ Customer Relationship Management solution helps increase revenues by enabling firms to manage communications across all sales and marketing channels, collaborate with dealers, interact with customers, and grow brand equity and customer loyalty. The integrated solution offers global insight, low implementation costs, and low total cost
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The SAP solution delivers functionality throughout the customer engagement and vehicle life cycle, enabling the full range of CRM processes and providing all the capabilities you need – particularly in the crucial areas of channel management, brand and customer management, customer interaction center, and roadside assistance.
Better Communication Across All Channels
Lack of communication between OEMs and their end customers is a pervasive problem. Contact between OEMs and customers is limited and often involves a customer-initiated problem or complaint. Or customers may hear only indirectly from the OEM in the form of marketing campaigns. So a key IT process requirement in the automotive industry is to facilitate effective communications between OEMs and their dealers and – through the dealers – with the customers who buy the vehicles. The mySAP CRM solution makes channel integration across entire networks possible in a cost-effective manner and supports key business processes. Sales and service organizations can give dealer employees access through portal applications and provide access to dealer management systems through Web-based services. For example, the portal solutions help enable business processes, whether it’s a dealer employee placing or confirming orders with the OEM or whether it’s a national sales company representative viewing
In the context of global expansion and competition of numerous businesses, effective marketing management is one of the key factors of success, playing an essential role in obtaining competitive advantage. Hence, the success of a company is determined by its ability to identify customers’ needs and offering products and/or services to satisfy them.
The key to creating an effective marketing strategy in business not only lies in creating value for the customer, but also in understanding that as they are more informed and investigative than ever, value creation must in fact be a collaborative effort with the customer (Lusch et al, 2008).
Chip Reeves, Director of marketing and sales addresses this issue by making systems easier to maneuver. Many companies and CIO's are struggling to determine exactly how to best mobilize critical applications that can bring measurable payback to the company but also limit the disruption to and administrative headaches in their user's lives. (O'brien, Marakas, 2011). Reeve's took into account, the customer's needs and the salespeople as well. Reeves was very focused on the CRM, or Customer Relationship management into account when suggesting products to streamline information for salespeople. Customer Relationship management involves four specific relationships which include: sales, service, quality, and support. Reeve's input a system that downsized the screens on the Blackberry applications to one page, which in turn led to more leads, an increase of about 50% and generated leads faster for salespeople.
In increasingly competitive markets, consumers have better choices over where they buy their products. For an organisation to meet its business objectives, it has to find out what consumers require and then identify the best way in which it can satisfy these needs and wants. Creating a competitive advantage can be difficult. A unique marketing strategy with clear objectives is vital to ensure effective promotional activity.
Manage sales functions, processes and resources as needed to secure new ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and Cross Sell software opportunities.
In order for other companies to hold market share in a competitive environment, they must continue to meet their target customers’ preferences with added value to maintain differentiation form direct competitor giants.
SAP provides businesses scalable and customizable solutions for all aspects of your clients' businesses, from production to marketing and Human Resources to finance reporting. Moreover, SAP products and applications will allow your clients to operate at peak efficiency levels, with better communication and faster decision-making. Therefore, the
products to our customers in profitable segments and win over new customers in new markets,
For most business owners, they would all be in agreement and say that the connection they have with their customers is very important to them because it decides if the business is going to be a great success, or if the business is going to take a nose-dive. As a result, of an increase in customer standards and financial difficulties most firms no matter how big they are, they are taking a second look and thinking about how technology can help them to develop healthier and stronger relationships, and how to capitalize on their business. The best way to handle this situation is to choose a good customer relationship management system this can help a business they can become more efficient while maximizing their productivity. However, CRM systems could only be used by enterprise organizations; that has all changed this system is now being used as an influential factor when determining how well an organization will do (Saab, 2011).
Simplifying the sales process along with exceeding customer expectations was the goal (O’Brien & Marakas, 2011). In order to accomplish that, identification of the exact data needed was the first step. By merging the various modules for customer management, would allow for instant information, such as inventory status, history of sales for a particular customer and open orders, that the salesperson could access while face to face with the customer. Making the system low data input increased the productivity and strengthened the customer bond. Consequently, the sales team realized a
‘Customer Relationship Management is the ultimate challenge for marketing experts in any business. A successful company will use customer information wisely to build relationships with their customers, on the level that together they will work together towards a long-term relationship.’ (Xu et al. 2002)
More than twelve million users operate each day using SAP solutions. SAP embodies 69,700 installations throughout the world and is affiliated with 1,500 partners. Some of the partners affiliated with SAP include Accenture, Siemens Business Services, IBM, DELL, Novell, Hewlett-Packard, and UNISYS. The professionals employed at SAP are steadfast at providing a customer support and
Today, customer relationship management is very important to the business world. Most of the companies established a department and the programs to manage their relationship with the customers. Customer relationship management (CRM) is a business strategy which designed to help a company to understand and look forward to the needs of its potential and current customers (Anderson & Stang, 2000). Customer data is being collected in several different areas of the company, stored in a central database, analyzed, and distributed to key points (Anderson & Stang, 2000).The business world once was “product-centric”, the companies just provided what they could produce. However, it is now become “customer-centric”, they provide products and service
I. Introduction 1. There are several basic approaches to competing successfully and gaining a competitive advantage, but they all involve giving buyers what they perceive as superior value compared to the offerings of rival sellers. 2. This chapter describes the five basic competitive strategy option for building competitive advantage and delivering superior value to customers – which of the five to
Knowing who your competitors are, and what they are offering, can help you to make your products, services and marketing stand out. It will enable you to set your prices competitively and help you to respond to rival marketing campaigns with your own initiatives. You can use this knowledge to create marketing strategies that take advantage of your competitors ' weaknesses, and improve your own business performance. You can also assess any threats posed by both new entrants to your market and current competitors. This knowledge will help you to be realistic about how successful you can be.