Specialist customer service for prestige cars

As the UK’s leading retailer of prestigious and specialist cars, Sytner knows that maintaining high-quality relationships with its customers and manufacturers is an essential part of growing the business.

“Selling the type of car we do successfully relies on customer loyalty and close personal contact. We also like to say we’re in partnership with great marques,” says Sytner’s e-Commerce Director, Martin Runnacles.

The strategy has worked well. Founded in the 1960’s by Frank Sytner, the current chairman, the Sytner Group has a turnover in excess of £600 million and owns 46 dealerships which represent all the major prestige brands, including Rolls-Royce, Ferrari, Porsche, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Audi, Jaguar and Land Rover.

“We certainly don’t see ourselves in opposition to the manufacturers, but you need to have a well integrated franchise operation if you’re to provide effective sales and service to the customer,” adds Runnacles.

QuickAddress, the address management software from QAS, has been a key element of this customer relationship management (CRM) project, adding value to Sytner’s new CRM system. The car retailer recently partnered with Logica to centralise all of its customer information, and integrate a new dedicated customer contact centre with its website to provide rapid access to Sytner’s stock of around 3,000 new and used cars. PeopleSoft was selected as the CRM platform for the contact centre agents and Logica integrated QuickAddress with PeopleSoft to provide a seamless solution.

“We initially selected QuickAddress because we knew it had a proven European customer base and utilised official Royal Mail data, which is regularly updated. The API (application programming interface) for both QuickAddress Pro and QuickAddress Nearest integrated very smoothly with PeopleSoft CRM, so the delivered solution meant that business changes within Sytner, such as the acquisition of a new dealership, could easily be accommodated by a simple user update procedure to QuickAddress,” says Hoon Ywen Li, Logica’s Senior Consultant who also acted as Sytner’s CRM Project Manager.

Using QuickAddress Pro, Sytner’s contact centre representatives only need to type in a postcode and house number to generate a full address from the Royal Mail’s Postcode Address File (PAF). QuickAddress Pro contains 27 million UK addresses and 1.7 million postcodes cleverly compressed to make them instantly available on the desktop.

Quality customer service

“It is very simple to use but provides us with essential functionality. Being able to capture addresses quickly and easily enhances customer service, speeds up the call and allows you to move forward to spend more time in an informed discussion with the customer. The service process isn’t about getting the customer on and off the phone quickly, but everything to do with having a quality conversation. QuickAddress helps us do that. Because it works so efficiently it doesn’t get in the way,” says Sytner’s Customer Relations Director, Louise Gale.

A customer looking for a new car can locate an appropriate vehicle via the web site and then immediately discuss any aspect of the car, or a potential transaction, with a qualified customer services representative in the contact centre. Inbound enquiries are typically from potential customers with an interest in buying a new or used car. Such calls offer sales conversion rates of around ten per cent, so the priority has to be to present customer details up on screen seamlessly in order that the representative can get on with the service process.

Using QuickAddress Nearest, the centre’s representatives can also direct a customer to their nearest dealership, by simply entering the customer’s postcode: “Because of the way QuickAddress Pro and Nearest are set up, it only takes a couple of keystrokes before you’ve got the dealership’s details up on screen,” continues Gale. “The representative clicks on a ‘dealer’ icon, then on another which points to the brand of car the customer is interested in, and then the dealerships selling that car nearest to the customer’s postcode pop up during the course of the conversation.”

The customer contact centre is also able to qualify information centrally and then filter it down to the dealerships to allow them to work on quality leads and close sales. Sytner has therefore been able to measure the centre’s performance, making sure that there is a consistent response to customer enquiries regardless of how they arrive.

“QuickAddress has been such an integral part of the operation from the start that it’s impossible to work out its return on investment separately, but we know we’ll have recovered the cost of the entire CRM project in 12 months,” concludes Runnacles.