The client

As the most recognised and respected name in car manufacturing, with 125 years of engineering innovation, Mercedes Benz required a top class customer service team to match their reputation for perfection. This partnership lasted 21 years.

Services provided

The dedicated team of RSVP agents, trained extensively in the products and brand philosophy, were furnished with a wealth of information by the RSVP CRM about the vehicle driven by the individual they were speaking to, their existing relationship with the brand and their enquiry history. This enabled us to deliver a personal experience every time and ensure that every individual was made to feel valued.

RSVP handled all direct response inbound calls from all national marketing activity (circa 120,000 calls per year). Outbound activity included prospecting marketing calls that generated around 300,000 test drives per year, prequalification calls to qualify coupon/web test drive requests, lost sales calls to follow up leads that had received a test drive but failed to purchase and around 30,000 retailer follow-up satisfaction calls. Data capture included web brochure requests (circa 95,000 per year), and coupon responses from all marketing activity (circa 80,000).

In addition to this, RSVP managed a fulfilment centre that was responsible for the packing and despatch of all Mercedes Benz brochure requests for both the UK and overseas. An average year would see the RSVP fulfilment centre send out around 130,000 brochures with covering letters.

Results

The challenge of working with Mercedes Benz was multi-layered. It was essential that their reputation for creating cars that “are as individual as the people who drive them” was embodied in the way that we their customers; each with their own discerning requirements.

Product knowledge was key to meeting the high expectations on this. Whether the customer was looking at cars, vans or trucks, our agents embraced them with a warm welcome and in-depth information about the options in which they had expressed an interest.

As well as making new customers feel welcome,

RSVP gave equal weight to ensuring that existing customers felt a part of the ever-growing Mercedes Benz family.

To help manage this wide variety of challenges we synchronised our CRM system with Mercedes Benz’ customer database and the DVLA’s vehicle records. This put us in the centre of a three-way information highway that enabled us to maximise the first contact resolution rate.

Behind all the frontline work, we provided Mercedes Benz with both detailed marketing response reporting and analysis, and outbound reporting analysis.