Full Case Study

Intro
Bajaj Auto Finance Limited is an asset finance company, dealing in the financing of consumer durables, personal computers, personal and small business loans, loans against property and loans against shares.

Bajaj recently moved its consumables financing and cross sell divisions onto salesforce.com, extending the functionality of cloud based CRM to 300 employees across 50+ Indian cities

Challenges
Among the multiple reasons for moving to a single platform CRM was to achieve a greater ability to drive the loan product in the stores.

“In our consumer durable business, customers typically choose to pay by either cash, credit card or by loan instalments. Typical transactions are by cash and credit card considering the ease in completing the product purchase.  But, credit card repeatedly wins out against loans because of the hassle of loan approval. We wanted to introduce a set of procedures and have a system in place to make loan approval instant and appealing!” explains Devang Mody, Business Leader – Salesfinance and Cross Sell.

In addition, Bajaj wanted to build campaign management systems for targeting   customers with a good payment record  and extending  the  personal loan offers available to them.

Back office functions were also up for review. These typically involved indentifying 1.5 million eligible customers from a database of around six million and then managing those contacts through the end to end sales cycle. Bajaj had previously been relying upon a home grown CRM, Microsoft Access and a series of Excel spreadsheets, which proved painful, difficult to scale and lacked accuracy. A single system was called for to take the headache out of managing both back office and front office functions to vastly improve loan turnaround times.

Solution
“Salesforce.com came forward with an uncomplicated solution that didn’t require us to channel resources into buying and maintaining hardware and software, leaving us free to strategise and focus our energy on delivering what the business needs.  Salesforce also enabled us to roll out new products and processes across our distribution network with fantastic ease! Salesforce.com’s cloud solution is an ideal match for our business,” says Jay Krishnan, Head of CRM, Bajaj Auto Finance.

Salesforce CRM went live in April 2009 and Bajaj set about using the system’s intuitive customisation toolset to bring all of the division’s major processes online with the integration of call centre application Dialer, internal dedupe system, Credit Bureau, and corporate mobile services (for SMS notification functionality).

Results
In particular, the facility for sending out SMS directly from salesforce.com to dealers to communicate loan approval has had a significant impact on loan turnaround times, slashing them down to around four minutes! Sharpened approval timelines help Bajaj to fulfil its ultimate goal in marketing the personal loan as a viable alternative to credit card.

A major indication of the success of salesforce.com is the level of loan activity during holiday season. Prior to implementation loan applications stood at around 1,500 per day, however the holiday season immediately following the deployment of Salesforce CRM showed a peak of 8,500 in a single day!

“We are talking about one transaction taking place roughly every four seconds – it is a testimony to the system’s robustness,” says Krishnan
Salesforce CRM has also provided Bajaj with a critical competitive advantage through supporting the roll out of Dealer Terminalisation, an industry first for a consumables financing company within the Indian Market.

“Our business is high transaction and low ticket - cost and efficiency makes all the difference between growth versus death.  Salesforce CRM has helped us to harness the power of internet, which in turn has helped us to achieve these objectives with a high level of customer satisfaction,” says Devang Mody, Business Head – Salesfinance & Cross Sell.