Cars.com Rolls Out Salesforce CRM Service to Accelerate 25,000 Transactions Each Month

Challenge

• Cars.com, the fastest-growing automotive marketplace on the Web, needed a solution to unify customer support data and more effectively field tens of thousands of cases each month
• The company lacked standardized processes across sales and customer service
• Support reps and sales agents conducted business using a rigid set of processes that failed to accommodate differences between B2B and B2C transactions
• With no case management system, support supervisors lacked visibility into agent activities, making it difficult to manage a highly dispersed workforce
• The company relied on limited technology resources to maintain and improve support applications
• Cars.com experienced a low percentage of incidents resolved by a single owner

Solution

• With help from salesforce.com partner Model Metrics, a cloud-computing CRM consulting firm, Cars.com implemented an integrated CRM solution based on Salesforce CRM Enterprise Edition
• The solution went live for 90 Cars.com service and support and sales employees within three months; the solution was subsequently deployed companywide within 12 months
• Leveraging Saleforce CRM's open architecture, the company easily integrated Salesforce CRM with Oracle's PeopleSoft Billing, along with custom-built applications for order entry and fulfillment
• System administrators created parent-child relationships for managing complex cases, allowing agents to track cases by case type
• Email-to-case capability allows agents to conduct all email communication from within the Salesforce CRM environment—without launching Microsoft Outlook
• Dashboards provide an easy way for management to communicate with agents, track turnaround times, and elicit team cohesiveness
• A central knowledge database simplifies training, provides solutions to common problems, and speeds up resolution of common issues

Results

• Support agent productivity increased by as much as 50 percent, from six to nine cases per hour
• Decreased case-handling time by 26 percent, from 13 to 9.5 minutes per request, accelerating the processing of 25,000 cases each month
• The peak agent workload increased from 600 dealers per agent to 800 dealers per agent, while cutting response times by more than 65 percent and consistently beating SLAs by more than 50 percent
• Whether dealers contact a sales rep or the support center with a problem via either email or phone, all case details are captured in a consistent manner
• Tight integration of sales and service processes yields more accurate customer information, increasing efficiency throughout the organization
• Flexible business processes accommodate differences between B2C and B2B relationships
• Created greater visibility into support metrics for motivating agents, allocating resources, and calculating staffing needs
• Improved overall customer service experience with quicker single owner resolution