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CRM: Case File - Apollo Tyres: Dealers' Choice

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DQI Bureau
New Update

Apollo Tyres Ltd was searching for a long-term CRM strategy and

solutions to add value to its stakeholders/dealers. Finally, ATL took the plunge

last year. The company had 147 locations spread across India to cater to its

dealers, the primary customers, with approximately 5,000 dealers to cover the

entire country.

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Dheeraj Sinha, head of IT division, Apollo Tyres, said, "A

key future direction was to enable our exclusive dealers to get access to our

central database and directly track various information fields relating to their

performance instead of depending on Apollo regional office for the same,"

said Sinha. "We felt that the dealers should feed in their requirements in

the system, which will be tracked for their status. Also, it was thought that

customers should have the option to feed their stock into the system, which will

allow them to track their stock status on daily basis," he added.

"Our exclusive dealers

can now access to our central database instead of depending on regional

offices for information"




-Dheeraj Sinha
head IT, Apollo

Tyres

Also, providing customers with the status of their requirements

with tentative delivery schedules, enabling dealers to have their financial

accounting for better financial management and track their achievements vs their

quarterly targets, creating a mailing system under the company's domain were

high on the agenda.

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Apollo's Approach



The company chose standardized SAP solutions to implement dealer portal
solution. "It was a comprehensive solution which gave us a self service

window, feedback window, e-mail facility, and a marketing communication,"

he added.

The solution enabled the company to view and download reports

(of statement of accounts, credit details, commitment vs achievement,

outstanding/ageing analysis, deposited cheques details/status, status of

participation level in different annual schemes) transactions with dealers etc.

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Technology Involved

The technical infrastructure

that has been put up as a part of the customer centric initiatives are:

  • SAP as the central

    database catering to all the add on applications (Dealer portal and

    SMS)

  • Dealer Portal based on

    the SQL database with SAP Connector with interface to mailing system

    of dealers

  • DIRS with workflow

    automation and e-mail integration of complete Apollo Tyres domain

    mailing system (Both Internal ATL mailing and dealers mailing with

    Apollo domain)

  • Robust and sufficient

    Internet bandwidth

  • SMS Gateway Server with

    interface to SAP

  • Collection of Customer

    data base

"The feedback window gave us details on product

performance, market trends, annual schemes. Moreover this window had a feature

of workflow where all these feedback goes to the concerned person and the

emailed reply from them go back to the dealer," Sinha said. Besides this,

email facility for dealers under the company's domain was also created.

"Anybody anywhere with an Internet enabled PC and a valid user ID and

password provided by ATL, can access the Dealer Portal of the company," he

added.

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Innovative SMSing



The company started its SMS based solution to reach out to dealer in areas
where infrastructure was very low for providing the customers with details of

the invoices, and status of the cheques deposited. This initiative helped the

dealers to know their key information at their fingertips without approaching

Apollo Tyres Ltd, Sinha said. The company has decided to leverage the same

infrastructure for internal customers also.

The SMS facility was extended to the sales force, wherein the

sales force can have the outstanding and credit details of the concerned dealers

on a daily basis. The sales force also had the facility to the query system for

the stock status at the relevant godowns.

Sinha further said that the company also implemented DIRS

(Dealers issues Redressal System), to receive the dealers' complaints for

addressing them immediately.

Team DQ 





maildqindia@cybermedia.co.in

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