Honda brings to market the world’s most successful range of motorcycle, power equipment and marine products. The Honda brand comes with assurances of excellent quality, technology, and performance. Great customer service is also implicit, and a first class CRM a must.

As is the case with many successful multi-tier sales operations, there came a point where Honda Australia Motorcycle & Power Equipment recognised that while it was diligently nurturing individual relationships – with partners, dealers and customers – each was closed off from the others. Inevitably, this meant valuable customer data being trapped in pockets within the organisation. Freeing up the flow of data would undoubtedly have a huge positive impact of efficiency throughout the business.

Outlining a strategy for creating Customers For Life through achieving a 360° customer view, Honda engaged Sqware Peg to take its data into the cloud using salesforce.com. The project, completed in phases, saw the transition of customer data from numerous spreadsheets and databases onto a single Salesforce platform. Customer information from Honda Australia Rider Training (HART), Automobile Association memberships, and several other sources were harmonised into a single comprehensive data source and reporting system.

Honda also established a dedicated CRM unit, equipped with a complete view of customer data and powerful marketing tool Eloqua, removing the responsibility for managing customer relationships from the individual departments and giving them back valuable time and resources for focusing on core activities. Now, for the first time, instead of hitting customers several times from different directions, Honda is able to consolidate outbound customer contact into meaningful and relevant communications – and accurately measure its effectiveness.

Integrating Eloqua with Salesforce has allowed Honda to build workflows into customer touch points, for example customer satisfaction surveys, guaranteeing follow up of any negative comments. The immediate effect has been a reduction in complaint resolution time from months to minutes.

Now operating as a unified brand, Honda is marketing smart, drawing on customer analytics to tailor EDMs to target audiences. During the four years since going live with Eloqua Honda has grown its customer email database from 10,000 to 100,000 - that’s a ten-fold increase in EDM targets, or ten times the opportunities for cross selling and up selling!