Monro Repairs its Customer Engagement With Data Management Tool
In an interview last week at CRMC 2017 in Chicago, Tom Tracy, senior vice president of marketing at Monro, an automotive services retail chain, discussed how the company is leveraging a new data management solution to help it better engage customers.
About a year ago, Monro went through an RFP process to find a CRM solution that would enable it to better manage relationships with its customers. The company has been growing, primarily through acquisition — it now nine brands under the Monro umbrella — and it needed a platform that was flexible and able to eliminate data silos that existed between the brands, Tracy said.
“There was a lot of work that needed to be done from a CRM perspective,” Tracy said. “Like a lot of companies 10 [years], 15 years ago, we had a database that was designed by our mail house. After my first year at Monro, we realized a $1 million savings in just our CRM budget alone from re-negotiating with the company that we were using at the time. There was a lot of unnecessary spend going on.”
Monro chose RedPoint, a provider of data management and customer engagement technology, to help it address its CRM needs. RedPoint’s platform is integrating Monro’s siloed data into a single, accessible database. Furthermore, Monro is supplementing its traditional point-of-sale data with customer review data, customer service data, website behavioral data.
As an automotive service business, being able to identify customers based on the last service they had done on their car, and then market to them with relevant messaging — e.g., our records indicate that you’re due for an oil change — is table stakes for Monro. Furthermore, Monro’s store-based POS data is now able to be shared between stores of the same brand as well as across brands, leading to a better experience for customers who may take their cars to multiple store locations.
Data Management Leads to Optimized Marketing
Monro is now able to dynamically personalize communications with customers based on the data they’re collecting from them in-store, online, customer service calls, ratings and reviews, among other channels. A great example of this is email. From a single template, Monro is able to create hundreds of messaging combinations based on appropriate sub-brand; specific year, make and model of vehicle; and relevant service offers (oil changes, tire alignments) based on the vehicle’s history.
Personalized communications are helping Monro to drive customer action, whether it be to go in-store for a 24-point inspection (with a coupon), ask them to review a recent service done on their vehicle, go to one of it brand’s websites for a special offer, etc. Ultimately, what everything is measured on is conversion.
“When I started at Monro, we were treating the car as if it were the customer,” Tracy says. “We weren’t really considering the customer’s needs.”
To gain a more holistic view of the customer, Monro is now building individual customer profiles that include personally identifiable information, vehicle data (year, make, model), channel preference data (email, mobile app), feedback data (surveys, customer service, ratings and reviews), and more.
“We’re moving towards a new breakthrough in our industry in terms of technology in which data is really going to be king for us. It will improve the customer experience; it’s going to make a customer feel like their car is a new car. Now we have a centralized customer engagement hub that everyone in the organization can tap into.”
Lastly, Tracy is excited to leverage RedPoint and its data platform to forecast trends, which will allow it to be proactive in making decisions about its customers, website, stores, marketing, and more.
