CEAT is one of India’s leading tyre manufacturers, producing over 35 million tyres annually. The company aims to be the leading player in the country by improving the consumer-channel experience and using technology to become a truly customer-centric organisation.

A roadblock in CEAT’s journey to customer-centricity was their existing CRM, which lacked several functionalities vital to the success of channel operations. The organisation’s data was spread across disparate systems. CEAT's sales team lacked visibility into channel operations data and struggled to work efficiently with their vast network. Dealers could not access the information they needed to enable strategic decisions.

The management team realised that they needed a reliable platform that would integrate all their processes and data, and function as a seamless interface between CEAT and the channel and the consumer.

They found the answer in Salesforce.

“The Salesforce platform offered a powerful technology roadmap,” says Arnab Banerjee, Chief Operating Officer. “The innovation that Salesforce is known for, its proven track record, and the clear benefits their solutions offer, all convinced us to look no further.”

Revving up channel performance with a customised dealer portal

CEAT deployed Salesforce Community Cloud to build a portal for its vast dealer network. By digitising all dealer-related processes on a single portal, they created a self-service platform that delivers a frictionless experience to channel partners. With the ability to manage their orders more efficiently through the portal, CEAT receives 80% of dealer orders and 90% payments online.

Rich features, such as e-claims, e-catalogues, and warranty registration, help them deliver a transparent and consistent customer experience. “Using e-claims, a dealer can instantly settle a customer’s claim through the app,” details Ritesh Arora, Chief Digital Officer. This has reduced the claim settlement time from two working days to instant settlement in 75% of cases across the channel.

“We won the prestigious CII award for the most innovative business practice in customer experience for this innovation,” says an enthusiastic Arora.

“Community Cloud has become the lifeline of our dealer business,” reveals Arora. “Our dealers tell us that everything they want is now available at their fingertips. They have clear visibility into stock, performance, schemes, and transparency into financials.”

CEAT has also integrated Fielo, a Salesforce AppExchange partner, to manage the dealer loyalty program with a whopping 85% redemption, a key indicator of a program’s success.    

“Community Cloud has become the lifeline of our dealer business.”- Ritesh Arora, Chief Digital Officer, CEAT.

Ensuring a grip on customer focus with Customer 360   

With complete dealer information now available on Salesforce, CEAT is using all that rich data to create a Customer 360 dashboard for their sales teams. The dashboard offers them the convenience of staying updated on everything from dealer performance to financials, achievements, targets and upcoming visit dates.

“Our sales teams have access to all dealer-related information in a single snapshot,” explains Arora. They have access to Tableau as well, which, integrated with Sales Cloud, allows them to get a variety of performance reports and dashboards for their territory. “With information available on their mobiles, our sales people no longer have to carry their laptops around, and look through multiple, lengthy reports to get a clear picture of dealer performance.” This is helping the sales team sell smarter and faster.

With dealers self-serving their needs, the sales teams are focusing on business development and quality of service and infrastructure at the dealerships. “We have noticed that around 50% of our sales representative’s time is freed up, and this vastly improves daily execution efficiency,” adds Arora.

Steering the company towards improved service and faster growth

CEAT also uses Service Cloud for case management. Automating and streamlining complaint and resolution processes on the platform has reduced complaint settlement time from four to two days on an average. All cases and action logs from customer visits are fed into a universal feedback dashboard that provides an aggregated view of all complaints & feedback by geography, product category, customer category etc. This helps CEAT identify recurring issues early on and take timely corrective actions.

Treading confidently into the future

At a strategic level, the Salesforce platform offers the CEAT management team visibility into all business operations. Armed with data and insights on dealer and sales rep performance, case resolution, and customer satisfaction, the management team now makes data-driven decisions to strategically grow the business. 

Arora says that CEAT’s technology roadmap calls for the implementation of many new developments on Salesforce, with several AI based programs and pilots in progress e.g.  SKU recommendation engine for the sales team to improve range selling at the dealer, merchandise analytics, AI based warranty registration and claims logging and many more.    

“This is truly going to be the era of the customer at CEAT,” concludes Bannerjee. And Salesforce is helping build that.