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The situation

Consisting of the financing, consortium and insurance bank divisions, Volkswagen Serviços Financeiros, part of Germany-based Volkswagen group, is a company that plays an important role in enabling its customers to make the best deals when purchasing and protecting their vehicles. Seven branches and service centers spread over the Brazilian territory are engaged in seeking state-of-the-art IT tools to serve all of the 700 Volkswagen dealerships and their customer portfolios.

Of all the technology tools that have become indispensable over the past few years, the Internet has stood out as being a crucial customer service tool. Through the Contact Us channel on the Volkswagen Bank's website (www.bancovolkswagen.com.br), customers can solve questions, get product and service information, and send suggestions.

Until December 2004, the contacts made through that communication channel were turned into e-mails, which were then sent to and dealt with by the Contact Us service team. The control over contacts and subsequent responses was performed manually by means of electronic spreadsheets, which posed a high degree of difficulty for monitoring the processes and consolidating the reports at the end of each month. The control over telephone contacts via 0800 was even more precarious.

That scenario motivated the group to go ahead and implement a CRM tool. “The Volkswagen Bank's board of directors, along with its Information Technology department, identified the need to improve the customer service provided through the Contact Us channel and consolidate the information that moved across it,” says Carlos Roberto Nicola, IT Supervisor at the bank. Then the process of choosing the technology to be used in the project was initiated, with the participation of Columbus IT.

The solution

According to Columbus IT's Sales Manager Duval Ferreira, the fact that the Volkswagen Bank is an experienced user of Microsoft technologies was a great facilitator for the adoption of the Microsoft CRM Business Solutions 1.2. The decision to select the Microsoft Business Solutions CRM system was made after the bank examined the possibility to internally develop a solution that would optimize both the customer service process and the information flow.

To assess the features of Microsoft CRM, a pilot project was carried out in March 2005, which led to the bank's IT team and Columbus IT to work together on customization and the development of forms. Columbus IT worked as a training and quality validation agent for the project that was being implemented mostly by the Volkswagen Bank's own team. “The customization process was surprisingly simple, and - because it was easy - the task was almost entirely left to the end user,” Nicola remarks. Four months elapsed between the start of the pilot project and the operational stage of the CRM system, and the bank's IT team dedicated themselves to this specific project during the intervals between other tasks that were being performed at the same time.

At the previous stage of the project, Columbus IT was also responsible for providing the infrastructure required for the implementation of Microsoft CRM. On account of an incompatibility between versions, the e-mail server had to be updated into the Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 platform. On the other hand, the Microsoft SQL Server 2000 used by the bank was already compatible with the CRM package and needed no updates. For the Microsoft CRM tool proper, it was just a matter of dedicating a specific server in the same domain as the e-mail servers and the database based on Microsoft Windows Server 2003.

According to the Volkswagen Bank's Technology Analyst Ricardo André dos Santos, the solution is functional and provides customers with more practicality. “The positive points of the Microsoft CRM platform are many, including its layout and the fact that it is easy to use with any web browser. After gaining some experience with this tool, we outlined several projects for implementing the CRM concept,” he adds. Those projects include three related customer assistance portals, all of which were integrated into Microsoft's customer relationship tool.

In the development stage, the bank's team discovered the flexibility of the tool. “Because it is a closed-code tool, we were worried about future customizations and integrations. However, using the Microsoft Software Development Kit (SDK), we conducted the integration into our legacy systems very easily,” Santos points out.

The benefits

By using the CRM tool to manage the Contact Us channel, the Volkswagen Bank was able to reduce its mean customer response times by a half. “Through the reports that we have now we can see the drop in our customer response time from 48 to 24 hours,” Nicola points out. According to the bank's IT Supervisor, the benefit is double: while providing more accurate control tools, the new scenario improves the quality of customer service. “The tool has shown that there was a pent-up demand on the Contact Us channel. From the 6,000 contacts that were made each month prior to the implementation of the CRM system, we are now responding to around 13,000 contacts in an equal period. And with much higher quality,” he adds.

In addition to automating the control over the website's customer service, the Microsoft CRM tool contributed to enhancing the quality of the information pertaining to contacts made through the Volkswagen Bank's 0800 telephone line. With it, the institution was given a rich source of data consisting of customer relationship history and customer profile. Today, all the information is centralized at one point, irrespective of the channel whereby the customer gets attention. Since it is also possible to maintain a database of frequently asked questions and corresponding answers, the customer service becomes more agile and consistent.

In addition to being faster, the consolidation of data generated by contacts made via the Contact Us channel now brings much richer and much more accurate information on the processes. Holding the reports provided by the Microsoft CRM tool, Volkswagen Bank can monitor more closely critical issues that have been generating a larger amount of doubts, while fostering efficiency among customer service operators and identifying points that are creating bottlenecks in the customer service function. “Previously, our follow-up was performed at the end of each month. With the help from Microsoft CRM, we have several kinds of information at hand at the time we need it,” says Nicola. Today, the bank also has full customer service statistics —including information on mean response times, number of contacts per period, and the most searched for themes — without the need to handle large volumes of spreadsheets or waiting until the end of the month to review them.

From the customer service operators' standpoint, the Microsoft CRM tool, combined with Columbus IT's experience in customer relationship processes, has caused the tasks to be performed much more efficiently and easily. For customers, this resulted in a higher quality customer service, and for the bank a better use and sizing of resources. “The bank was able to automate several processes,” says Ferreira. “With the tool's workflow feature we can prioritize responses to certain subject categories, while segmenting types of questions by customer service groups so that the responses can be more accurate and faster,” says Columbus IT's Sales Manager. Following this implementation, Volkswagen Bank intends to gather together all of the data accumulated by the Microsoft CRM tool so as to create a powerful datawarehouse that will serve as a source for more complex CRM and business intelligence actions.