CRM strategies for construction equipment division of Bahwan automotive center

Abstract

With a customer driven policy Construction equipment division has been enjoying a major market share. But this share has its pitfalls of low margins because of increasing competition. There has been a shift in the customers purchasing patterns and certain customers like the government has reduced its spending on equipment purchases. With entry of new competitors and proliferation of products it is necessary to maintain and expand the customer base to cater to the new market segments. The advance in technology has customers exposed to a high level of products and services. Hence it becomes necessary to perform operations from the customer focused in mind. CRM suggests the customers to be categorised into profitable, non-profitable and future customers and different strategies to be adopted for them. This could be achieved by an integrated IT system which gives online information about the customers to all the concerned. Keeping this in mind a detailed survey was carried out to know the opinion of these customers on the aspects of Sales quality, After sales service, Parts Support, Facilities and Infrastructure provided to the customers. The questionnaire was also designed keeping in mind the competition aspects. Most of the data was collected from the customers while the data about the competition and the market share was readily available as such analysis is done on a regular basis. The survey objective was to highlight the deficiencies in the existing system if any and to find out the gap between the service provided and the expectations of the customer. The survey revealed that the overall services provided by the Construction Equipment Division was very good and customers were satisfied, while suggesting improvements in certain areas of sales, after sales support and parts support. The views were taken separately for different customer segments namely Government customers, large corporate customers, Medium corporate customers and Individual customers. This helped in knowing the requirements and expectations of the markets segments separately. The requirement and expectations of the Large and Medium corporate customers were much when compared to the Government and individual customers. Based on the survey analysis a set of recommendations are made for the different market segments chosen. This would help in distributing the efforts effectively to cater to the various segments of the market. The management is also quite aware of the deficiencies and would go all out to improve the services to the customer. It is suggested that Quality Function Deployment approach be used to implement the survey findings, this would ensure that a proper system is in place and the final outcome would take care of providing better customer satisfaction and bridge gap between the service provided and the service expected. To be customer focused it is also suggested that the internal IT systems with in the organisation be integrated for better customer information leading to a better service to the customer. A few sets of Internet solutions were suggested so that the customers could readily access the information about products and services.