BMW is the leader in New Zealand’s booming luxury car market, holding a 24.5 per cent market share. Last year, New Zealanders snapped up a total of 1,600 new BMW vehicles of all types.

BMW Group New Zealand works with a network of 12 authorised dealers throughout the country, importing cars and providing sales and marketing expertise, parts and service support, warranty management and service planning. The national office maintains a comprehensive database of all existing customers.

The national office and authorised dealers work closely together through the customer life cycle. This process begins with getting a potential customer's attention and proceeds through branding advertising and direct marketing, teaching prospects about the products, turning them into a paying customers, and then retaining them as loyal customers whose satisfaction with the product or service encourages other customers to join the cycle.

Competition in New Zealand’s luxury car market has been heating up in recent years, both in terms of the  marques and the categories of vehicles which are vying for this segment. While BMW, Mercedes and Audi had the market pretty much to themselves at the turn of the millennium, new players such as Alfa Romeo, Saab, VW, Volvo and Lexus are offering more options to the luxury car buyer.

BMW marketing services manager Tony Rogers says the market has “massified” as luxury cars become more accessible to a wider range of people. While this has increased the size of the market, the array of options available within marques, particularly in the area of recreational vehicles such as SUVs, has also expanded. The competitive threat of unauthorised importers is also confusing the marketplace. 

In this environment, BMW needed to invest in its ability to get close to customers and their needs, and become more agile in its response.

The challenge
By 2002 BMW started looking for a technology solution to help it achieve a goal of moving from a sales-based company to a truly customer-centric enterprise. Its existing customer database system was a Unitrac contact management system, which was doing an admirable job of holding information about customers and tracking all activities and tasks connected to them, but BMW had decided it needed a customer relationship management system that would help it to optimise revenue by improving customer satisfaction in every interaction at all levels of the company.

The marketing department’s research led to a short list of three customer relationship management systems. One was FrontRange Solutions’ GoldMine customer relationship management programme, and two were proprietary systems being used by Group offices in South Africa and Australia.

Rogers says BMW New Zealand chose GoldMine because it offered several key benefits. Not only did Goldmine offer excellent value for money but it was easy to customise to BMW’s individual requirements and it was suitable for a small market of New Zealand’s size

The international company agreed to a pilot a BMW-customised version of the system in New Zealand to test its suitability for small marketplaces around the world, and also to fund much of the development work.

The solution
BMW opted for GoldMine Corporate edition in an installation that would provide a big-picture view of activities and sales, provide multiple remote access and integration options, and proactively manage opportunities and customers' needs.

The solution would allow BMW to create, manage, preview and generate reports from a central area, as well as access Microsoft SQL business intelligence tools and analyse data. Goldmine would also automate database administration and direct marketing by generating targeted, personalised email and letters from a central location, and allow key information to be shared.

Implementation
BMW was aware that the implementation of such a critical customer-facing system involved some risk. But Goldmine’s New Zealand distributor Olympic Software not only created an installation plan, it arranged a deployment process that enabled it to get alongside BMW as the transition between systems got underway. The goal was to remain close to the client until the new system was on a “business as usual” footing.

Olympic assigned a consultant to stay on site for the duration of the installation, working closely with BMW’s database administrator. The consultant identified and shared key areas of knowledge about GoldMine that BMW needed to achieve its vision of becoming customer-centric in all of its operations.

Comprehensive training was provided for all who were to use the system, not only in how it worked, but how to handle scenarios that were specific to BMW’s business situation.

Rogers says he later realised the importance of partnership in software deployment when he saw implementations get derailed at other enterprises due to lack of post-implementation support.

“Olympic’s support was absolutely excellent,” he says. “I felt that after implementation we had emerged with a strong partner in Olympic, and the relationship has stood the test of time.”

Since the initial installation, BMW has implemented several upgrades of both its GoldMine system, and its customised modules.  

Results
GoldMine was a critical component of BMW’s shift from a sales orientation to an organisation-wide customer-centric focus. Now, the company has a single view of the customer, which gives staff the ability to add maximum value to each customer relationship, increasing the company’s ability to ensure satisfaction.

“GoldMine enables us to get a snapshot of the environment incredibly quickly and make informed decisions so we can provide better service to customers than before, and it helps us to prospect in a more intelligent way,” says Rogers.

As a pilot project in New Zealand, GoldMine has proved its worth. The solution was adopted in mid-2002 as BMW’s preferred CRM system for small markets worldwide.

October 2005