How a Centralize Customer Database Can Help Cross-sell and Strengthen Brand Image

Summary:

Being a CIO is no longer about supporting business, it’s about building your brand and taking the business ahead of the competition. Read how Arvind Tawde did just that.

Highlights:

By building a common customer database, he strengthened the Mahindra Group’s relationship with its customers and enhanced its brand image. The success of the project can be best illustrated by the Xylo campaign where a whopping 10 percent of the company’s e-mail database responded with positive feedback.

When Mahindra Xylo launched in January this year, nearly 6,000 SUVs were booked in the first two weeks, despite the slowdown. And a lot of that had to do with Arvind Tawde, senior VP and CIO, Mahindra & Mahindra.

The CCDB has helped us enhance our brand image by providing a delightful and consistent experience to our customers.

A year-and-a-half back Tawde initiated the common customer database project (CCDB) pooling in the customer databases of six business units: the Auto sector, Farm Equipment sector, Mahindra Finance, Mahindra Holidays, Mahindra Life Spaces and Mahindra Insurance. “The two major objectives of the project were to leverage the synergy within the group and enhance the Mahindra brand image. We recognized the potential of creating a common customer database and consolidating different attributes of our customers to provide a richer understanding of customer profile,” he says. The Mahindra group offers its customers a range of products with different lifecycles. Tawde and his team collated demographic information gathered over four years and cleansed the data into a single database, eliminating the discrepancies with frequent updates. For this, Tawde used enterprise information bus technology, which connects multiple business apps and databases of the business g units and ensures real-time business event monitoring and predicative responses. But because the company’s customer data comes from different dealers, IT processes of data collection weren’t congruent across all units. So, the management of the participating units agreed upon having common minimum fields at customer touch-points. Today, thanks to Tawde, CCDB has an impressive database of 22 lakh customers. CCDB is being used for various cross-selling campaigns, reaching out to existing customers at a much lower cost. Also, Mahindra keeps its customers intimated about new products, while offering them additional incentives. It has further reduced the cost of acquiring new customers.

 

 

The CCDB has helped us enhance our brand image by providing a delightful and consistent experience to our customers.

“We created a high decibel pre-launch buzz arond the XYLO using digital media and CCDB contributed significantly by leading over 13,000 visitors to the Xylo pre-launch website, generating more than 1,400 test drive requests,” says Vivek Nayer, senior VP marketingAutomotive Sector, Mahindra & Mahindra. The success of the project can be best illustrated by the Xylo campaign where a whopping 10 percent of the company’s e-mail database responded with positive feedback. “The CCDB has helped us enhance our brand image by providing a delightful and consistent experience to our customers,” says Tawde. And that it has.

Also read, how a Customer Loyalty Program Helped Business grow at the Landmark group