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Toyota Canada Inc.
CustomerOne
A New Kind of Integrated Company Emerges From the Application of IT
Challenge
Since the 1960s, Toyota Canada Inc. has been selling, marketing and distributing Toyota and Lexus vehicles manufacturerd by Toyota Motor Corporation. Annual sales have reached the $6-billion level. Still, customer surveys and internal studies a few years ago showed the company that there were weak spots in its relations with customers at certain points in the ownership life sycle.
In 2004 Toyota Canada launched a program called CustomerOne aimed at providing an exceptional ownership experience that leads to life-long brand loyalty. CustomerOne considers all customer touch points such as searching for the product, obtaining the product, owning the product and finally replacing it. All touch points are analyzed and grouped into 14 categories called Customer Impact Areas (CIAs).
The company realized that, to achieve customer satisfaction in all 14 CIAs, there was a need to share key customer and vehicle information at the appropriate time, with the appropriate stakeholders, and the need for everyone to collaborate to create a unique customer experience. That, in turn, required a unique IT solution.
Solution
The solution has positioned Toyota Canada as an internationally advanced manufacturing and sales organization by enabling the sharing and standardization of data and processes across all of its stakeholder organizations. That is, all dealers, the manufacturer, the financing company and the customer, as appropriate, have access to the CustomerOne system, contribute information to it and retrieve and analyze information from it in turn.
Customer information includes his/her product ownership, services history and issues history. All stakeholders have access to appropriate information through one of three portals - one for customers, one for dealers and one for Toyota Canada internal organizations and some suppliers.
Results
The CustomerOne system rests on two foundations: unification of the technology platform and work processes at all dealerships, and a data-sharing agreement among dealers, the manufacturer and Toyota Canada's subsidiary financing company, Toyota Credit Canada Inc.
Building these foundations took a long time. CustomerOne was two years in development and then took 18 months to roll out before its launch in 2004. It required collaboration on a national scale.
First there was collaboration between Toyota Canada's IT department and the business units to define processes, data standards and customer response service levels. Then there were the dealers - 269 independent business owners who agreed to participate and collaborate on new processes and standards.
CustomerOne has transformed Toyota Canada into a multi-layered organization that is uniformly aware of the experiences and opinions of individual customers and uses that information collectively to improve customer satisfaction and gain market share.
For example, if a customer complains about a service issue at a dealership, the dealer logs the event and that information is available right away at any Toyota dealer the customer might visit in Canada. It is also known at Toyota Canada's central call centre, known as the customer interaction centre (CIC). If the customer calls the CIC after that, he/she does not need to explain the problem twice, since the CIC rep is already aware of the issue.
If the complaint is related to a vehicle problem, since the vehicle service history is part of the information within CustomerOne, the CIC rep will be able to assess and deal with the issue. More significantly on a broad scale, if the customer's vehicle problem shows up in widespread instances, the entire Toyota Canada network becomes aware of it.
This means that Toyota Canada can identify at an early stage any persistent problems showing up with equipment or components. It can notify dealers so that, if a customer comes in for regular maintenance, a part known to be causing problems can be replaced even before the customer might notice anything wrong. The data is also analyzed for future use in design and manufacturing.
All told, 12,000 users within Toyota Canada's supply and service chain use the system to serve 1.2 million customers with a focus on continuous improvement.
Innovative Use of Technology
Several key elements of the system, although principally off the shelf, were integrated in a unique, innovative architecture.
- A customer support and dealer management system, the Reynolds and Reynolds Dealer Management System, has been consistently implemented in dealerships across Canada. It is a UNIX based system, running PeopleSoft's CRM 8 customer-relationship-management platform. The communications link between dealers and Toyota Canada goes through the open Internet using standard Web browsers but is secured using encryption technology.
- All system historical data is downloaded to a Cognos data warehouse for analysis. A custom-built application called RAPID, using Cognos technology, is used to perform data and trend analysis.
- Presentation of customer information to stakeholders is accomplished through Peoplesoft CRM8 linked to three portals: the customer portal, a custom-built IBM Websphere product; the dealer portal, a Vignett Portal product, and the portal for internal customers, suppliers and the financing organization, which is Lotus Notes based.
The findings of the CustomerOne system are helping Toyota manufacturing, engineering and assembly plants around the world to improve vehicle quality, defects detection and resolution management. Toyota Motor Corporation is considering CustomerOne as a way to do business worldwide.
A 2007 CIPA Winner!
For its outstanding application of information technology to transform processes and bring knowledge-based benefits to stakeholders, Toyota Canada Inc. has been awarded the 2007 CIPA Diamond Award of Excellence in the for-profit sector.
Technology partners
Cognos Inc.
Deloitte Canada
IBM Canada Ltd.
Oracle Corporation Canada Inc. (incorporating PeopleSoft)
Vignette Corporation
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