An inside view to Toyota’s unified enterprise customer experience
Cars are gathering more data than ever, from vehicle performance data to user behavior data. But are auto retailers able to organize all this data and use it to improve the customer experience? If so, how are they doing this?
One way is through enterprise data marketing (EDM), a strategy that makes use of online and offline data and enables a company to gain helpful insights about customers. Attendees at the recent Adobe Summit in Las Vegas had a chance to hear how it can work from Toyota Motors and its EDM project with database marketing partner Acxiom, based in Conway, Arkansas.
Acxiom built an enterprise marketing platform that provides Toyota with a unified view of the customer across its marketing ecosystem. The objective is delivering a rewarding customer experience by integrating offline and online customer data to create customer behavior files and a «360-degree view» of the consumer.
According to an Adobe summary provided to conference attendees, the Acxiom platform helped Toyota to:
Establish compliance controls to ensure the ethical use of first- and third-party data in the environment across the automaker’s retail and financial services divisions.
Determine the changing roles within customer households — financier, purchase influencers and drivers.
Develop leads based on shoppers’ known interests and preferences.
The new car buying experience
Steve Letourneau, vice president of strategic growth at Acxiom, said the car buying experience has changed thanks to digital commerce. Where customers in the past spent a lot of time visiting dealerships to gather information on cars, they now come to the dealer site with a specific car in mind, color, make and model, he explained. In addition consumers have an idea what the price should be and have researched potential incentives.
From the retailer’s perspective, digital commerce has created more customer data, but it has also delivered an array of data silos for social media, search, content, email and public relations, Letourneau said.
The biggest challenge for the retailer is to connect the consumer to attributes to help personalize the experience.
«It all has to start with (customer) identity,» Letourneau said.
A unified view of the customer
In the conference session, Rahul Pethe, a senior analyst at Toyota Financial Services, explained the «One Toyota» market vision.
The objective is to provide one view of the customer across the Toyota enterprise.
«It’s essentially going to drive customer engagement throughout the life cycle of the customer,» he said.
Prior to partnering with Acxiom, Toyota worked with different marketing partners that did not share a single view of the Toyota customer. No marketing solution met business demands in terms of scalability or performance improvement.
«We never had an all-in-one tool,» Pethe said.
There was also a challenge in integrating customer financial data with original equipment manufacturer data on one platform, Pethe said. Knowing what customer data they could and could not share was a challenge due to privacy concerns. Another challenge was ease of use of the data for marketing and analytics.
Acxiom brought dealer data, website data, social media data, mail data, direct mail data and Toyota cross enterprise data all together, Letourneau said.
The automated mapping solution allows the system to create one identity for the customer, he explained. That identity incorporates 75 different file inputs coming in daily to build the customer profile — including customer data from service visits, financial information, vehicle sales, Google cookie ID, Apple device ID and Oracle cookie ID. The customer identity file updates in real time.
Acxiom creates an enterprise customer ID and a separate customer ID for each division (service, financial and Lexus). «If there’s a touch point on a CRM here for Lexus, it always comes back to the Toyota ID,» Letourneau said.
The car maker can pull a customer’s history in terms of what vehicle they previously owned, Pethe added, and know whether they are a leasee or a finance owner, where they do servicing and more information, all in a single dashboard.
«Now, since we have a holistic view. We know how many times somebody from the enterprise is touching the customer,» Pethe said.
Expertise is needed
Pethe encouraged session attendees, who are attempting an enterprise marketing database project, to rely on experts.
«Nail down your data piece first, and then other things you can plug and play,» Pethe advised.
He said Toyota spent six to eight months working on the project before onboarding Acxiom and 40 Toyota employees were involved in the design and project implementation.
«It wasn’t just about the data, it’s about the culture,» he said.
