Toyota Indonesia: Great Consumer Experience Approach

Toyota Indonesia with their philosophy of “customer first”, had been aware of the importance of managing good customer relationship management. Customers had been located in the centre of the company DNA. Customer relationship management could be seen as “series of strategies and processes that create new and mutual value for individual customers, build preference for their organizations and improves business results over a lifetime of association with their customers” (Gordon, 2002, p.1).

Toyota Indonesia creates a great customer experience by integrating and utilising every strategic capability (technology, people, process, knowledge and insight) that they have. Technology has been concerned by utilising the web services, hotline services, and computerised database system. By utilising technology, Toyota Indonesia are able to integrate their customers at various touch points. Technology also enables Toyota Indonesia to understand the right time for a certain customer to buy, and understand what to offer to a certain customer. In this way, they are able to understand who the customers are, what they want, and provides a seamless multi-channel experience to help customers achieve their outcomes. Toyota Indonesia is also aware of the importance of their human resources. In order to make their strategy to allocate the same sales representative to the same customer works, Toyota Indonesia have to ensure that all the sales representative members are given the same amount of knowledge to serve their customers. Because of that, Toyota Indonesia had continuously conduct training and development that would enhance their employees skills, abilities, and attitude.

Involving their customers and suppliers to collaborate in Toyota Indonesia process of creating values and mutual satisfaction is also one best practice that could be seen from Toyota Indonesia. Suppliers are involved in the business process to ensure the quality and availability of products which would be delivered to end users. This openness of communication with the suppliers will enhance the trust of the suppliers and customers towards Toyota Indonesia. Customers are involved by applying the pull strategies where Toyota Indonesia could learn better regarding what the customers need.

The strategy of Toyota Indonesia to give great customer experience has several strengths. First, the way they utilise diverse range of technologies to interact with customers had given them a strong ability to reach diverse range of customers on different touch points at different life cycle. This would enable them to satisfy all of their customer segments by being aware that Toyota Indonesia had large range of different customer segments. Second, by involving the customers and suppliers in the business process, Toyota Indonesia could capture new opportunities. Collaborating information from customers and suppliers would enable Toyota Indonesia to capture hidden needs and opportunities that would support the new product concept development. Third, the action of combining a balance amount of companies capabilities to support the CRM would enable Toyota Indonesia to have a rich set of data mining collection that would be able to be utilised for future development of the business. Fourth, combining a balance amount of companies capabilities to support the CRM would also enable Toyota Indonesia to reduce infrastructure cost resulted from the shared investments of companies capabilities elements.

However, this strategy also comes with several weaknesses. First, expensive financial and time resources would be utilised in order to integrate the company strategic capabilities. Building good strategic capabilities that would work when being integrated does not come easy and cheap. Second, their strategy on having a customer being served with the same staff had given too much risk for the company. The strategy might be a good way to create emotional attachment between the customer and the company. However, this strategy gives negative impact on the company when that particular employee cannot perform what is expected (human error) or when that particular employee resigns from the company to move to be the competitors’ representative.

This article has been written by HANDINI AUDITA and assessed by UNIVERSITY OF STRATHCLYDE, UNITED KINGDOM. This article are assessed for the subject of Consumer Management 1 by Dr.Fred Lemke