Case Study: Honda

About Honda

Honda is a globally renowned brand – manufacturing cars, motorcycles, scooters, jet planes, marine engines and even robots, employing over 190,000 people worldwide. Honda (UK) was established in 1965 and forms part of the Honda Motor Company.

The Challenge

The corporate car fleet market represents an important and growing sector for Honda (UK). Maintaining and developing key business relationships while enabling a complex variety of integrated sales and marketing activities is a commercial priority.

However, its CRM system lacked both flexibility and integration functionality, which hindered Honda (UK) from responding quickly to changing customer needs.

The business needed a highly adaptable CRM solution that would better support its fleet sales division.

“We’d already taken the decision to make the move,” explains Ciaran Doyle, Business Analyst at Honda (UK) Corporate.

“Our objective was to implement a CRM platform that would enable us to take customer service to a new level and execute innovative ways of working that would further elevate our brand in the corporate fleet market.”

The Solution

Choosing ServerSys as its implementation and support provider enabled Honda (UK) to make the change-over to a new, fully operational CRM solution within 4 months and evolve its CRM platform in response to changing business demands.

“We wanted to harness the full potential of our new CRM,” says Ciaran. “This would enable us to generate ground-breaking services to support not only our associates but ultimately our customers too.”

As well as undertaking the switchover to the new solution, the selected implementation partner would also be responsible for ensuring the CRM system contained robust processes defined to the specific requirements of the business. A further key requirement was seamless integration with Honda’s business critical, global and local systems, as well as those of external agencies.

“In a fast-moving business such as ours, we need the flexibility to implement new processes almost weekly. Defining the system appropriately at the outset would be critical to its long-term efficacy – in terms of supporting our short and longer-term business objectives,” explains Ciaran.

“As an implementation partner ServerSys offered a unique combination of experience and expertise,” he continues.

“Having worked extensively with the motor trade and other manufacturers, they understood our business intimately. Added to this, they offered extensive CRM technical knowledge, having completed a number of major implementation and migration projects. Finally, from almost day one, they demonstrated their superb integration skills”.

The Drive to Go Live

Working closely with Honda (UK)’s development team, ServerSys began to scope the CRM system requirements.

Using a Rapid Application Development technique, ServerSys was able to prototype and refine the system in just 3 months before developing the migration routines to support the seamless changeover from Honda (UK)’s legacy system.

“Implementation was extremely rapid,” confirms Ciaran. “We always recognised the transition process would be business critical, as our sales and marketing processes are dependent on robust systems being in place and operational – and ServerSys delivered on every level.”

For the initial implementation phase, interfaces to 4 critical internal systems – demonstrator vehicles, customer orders, customer registrations and the corporate contracts database – were put in place. Since the original go live, ServerSys has integrated a further 4 systems.

Users, including field sales associates, head office staff, and external specialist agencies, now have access to comprehensive customer interaction data.

“The new CRM system gives our people comprehensive information about every touch point and interaction with customers,” explains Ciaran.
“It’s given us new ways to view our customer relationships and enabled us to make better and more informed strategic decisions.”

“Working in partnership with ServerSys has enabled us to define, deploy, and continually refine a personalised CRM solution that’s highly responsive to changing business demands. Acting as an extension to our in-house development team, ServerSys works side-by-side with us, helping ensure we continually deliver what the business needs, they’ve become integral to how we work.”

Ciaran Doyle, Business Analyst, Honda (UK) Corporate Selecting

Ongoing Support and Development

Honda (UK) relies on ServerSys for a wide range of support services, including the implementation of ongoing system refinements.

“We view ServerSys as an extension of our in-house development team,” says Ciaran.

“As CRM specialists, we rely on them to implement system modifications and new processes, as well as enabling the planned introduction of new functionality and enhancements,” he continues.

The process has re-invigorated its field associate’s belief of what can be achieved with a powerful, flexible CRM database. New ways of working mean Honda associates can better service customers.

“ServerSys are specialists in our CRM product, and we rely on them to resolve and escalate issues, monitor performance, identify training issues and provide management information reports that enable us to deliver against our business needs,” explains Doyle.