Car-mad Colin Giltrap opened his first dealership in 1966. Today, Giltrap Group employs over 800 people and imports, retails and distributes 18 of the world’s best car brands across 15 Auckland locations. Giltrap dealerships take pride in offering a world-leading customer experience, offering everything from sales, servicing, grooming, finance and insurance, to whole fleet solutions.
Giltrap’s dedication to their customers drove their initial adoption of Dynamics CRM and an integrated marketing solution through Fusion5. A continued focus on improvement led Giltrap to upgrade to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement online in 2020, again with Fusion5.
Smoothing the customer journey
Following several years as Business Manager for Giltrap’s Dealer Management System (DMS), Steve Newman took on the role of CRM Project Coordinator. He worked closely with Fusion5 throughout the Dynamics 365 project.
“Our goal was to improve both our operational and marketing capabilities,” says Newman. “Fusion5 helped us change a lot of the processes affecting the business, including improving the service workflows in the new CRM, and capturing and using data from our DMS.”
“Our biggest issue was that our dealerships are independently run, so each service centre had its own way of collecting and entering information into the DMS. However, when we tried to use that data in the CRM, much of it proved to be either incomplete or incorrectly entered, which was frustrating for our marketing team.
“Retaining clients is our main business focus,” says Newman, “but that’s hard to do if we don’t know who they are. To clean up our data, we set up a central call centre as our main hub for collecting customer details using the CRM, and we’re now doing a much better job. Now we have the right data at our fingertips, we’re even ahead of schedule of how many people we should be contacting!”
A new end-to-end digital marketing platform
Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement’s enriched functionality, alongside Power Platform, out-of-the-box Power Apps, and tools like Power BI, means
Giltrap can significantly improve the customer experience. Giltrap aspire to deliver exceptional service and are committed to maintaining meaningful, genuine relationships with their clients. To stay true to their ideals in a fast-paced world where customers are infinitely busier, and staff have ever more demands on their memories and time, the new digital platform enables Giltrap to seamlessly support and augment the customer experience. Giltrap can meet the digital expectations of the modern customer without eroding the highly valued personal touches which set them apart in a competitive market. Additionally, the wider infrastructure move to Azure had the added advantage of reducing internal infrastructure costs and responsibilities.
Bringing on the Dynamics 365 solution means that Giltrap staff benefit from increased and more disciplined usage of the CRM. It gives the operational and marketing departments better and more insightful reporting, and a deeper customer understanding. Staff can refine and improve their lead generation activities, and apply lead scoring. The Giltrap sales team now understand why a sale was lost and can enrol their prospect in an automated campaign to win them back. They can do the same with lapsed service customers.
Marketing magic
Giltrap uses Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement to measure everything from the number of calls made, to how many emails were sent, opened and acted on. Fusion5 also gave Giltrap the ability to use SMS for those contacts who choose text as their preferred method of communication. The SMSs are also completely trackable.
“SMS is one of our most effective tools,” says Newman. “It’s been particularly successful, and our customers seem to like it a lot. If we can’t contact a customer on the phone, we send a follow-up text message, which includes a link to a landing page so they can book in a vehicle for a service on the same screen. While SMS is a brand-new initiative for us, it’s already got a 10-20% conversion rate, which is fantastic. Within a minute of sending out a bulk text we have a 10% response rate. It’s great!”
While SMS works particularly well for some of Giltrap’s dealerships and brands, Newman says there are exceptions. “Audi customers love texting. Whereas Nissan customers prefer us to call. So, it’s a mixed response, and we’re learning the dynamics of each market.”
To make sure they use the most effective method of contact, Giltrap’s call centre captures all customer communication preferences in the CRM.
The new system supports and enables Giltrap’s roadmap for the perfect customer journey. Because Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement is fully integrated with Giltrap’s DMS, Newman says they keep a tight rein on the quality of the data being entered.
Smart service
The company now automates the service offerings that make up a large part of the business, including WOFs, service plans and recalls. The data collected through Giltrap’s call centre is also immediately available to support always-on marketing for trade-up offers, promotions for new-to-market vehicles, and to advertise what’s currently for sale at the dealerships.
Information is captured when a car comes in for a service giving Giltrap an opportunity to upsell, by offering the customer a more recent vehicle to trial while theirs is in the workshop. And because tracking end dates for service plans, warranties and fleet leasing agreements is automated, Giltrap can actively engage customers in a timely conversation or nurturing campaign to extend or upgrade agreements.
Giltrap are also trialing a red-carpet alert system based on numberplate recognition. The CRM automatically generates emails to sales advisors, salespeople and the sales manager as their highest-value VIP customers arrive.
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