Santander Consumer USA drives success with mobile access to salesforce.com

Challenge

• Leading provider of automotive-financing programs needed a better way to manage information on dealer customers
• Existing systems were fragmented and didn’t scale. They, included Outlook for contacts and e-mail, Microsoft Access for loan information, an an in-house platform for dealer-activity reporting, as well as paper-based meeting notes
• Generating reports from the Microsoft Access database was slow and could take the IT team up to seven days to deliver

Solution

• Considered Microsoft CRM but chose the Sales Cloud with Force.com for ease of deployment and affordability. Initial rollout took just three weeks; salesforce.com was eventually deployed to 145 employees
• Mobile access let reps, who work exclusively from the road, easily access and update records via BlackBerry devices
• Ribbit from the AppExchange automatically converted speech to text so voicemails could be automatically added to CRM records, read by a rep on the road and dictated
• Integration with SQL databases let employees get the most up-to-date information in one place
• Outlook integration maintained a record of customer information and keeps contacts up to date
• Arrowpointe Maps from the AppExchange helped reps plan the most efficient itineraries

Results

• Reps get up to speed far more quickly. Before implementing salesforce.com, it could take as long as six weeks for reps to get a feel for their territories. Now they can get a great snapshot within a week
• With 90 reps Santander estimated it saves 90 hours a day or approximately $1,080,000 per year by using Ribbit and other salesforce.com tools
• Average follow-up time on a loan application decreased from roughly 24 hours to around 2 hours. This meant more loans for Santander and an overall increase in dealer satisfaction
• Prevented millions of dollars in bad loans by allowing Santander to flag closing dealerships and review their active loan applications.
• Reduced the time to respond to a question from a dealer from 1 hour to roughly 15 minutes. In addition, the time to look up information on a specific loan application dropped from 1 hour to 30 seconds
• Data accuracy improved to over 90 percent from around 50 percent