Company Background The official name the company is Mitsubishi Motors North America, Inc. Until the late 1990s, Mitsubishi Motor Sales of America Inc. was only about cars.The parent company is Mitsubishi Motors Corporation (MMC), which is a Japanese company with German-American alliance partner and is a multinational manufacturer and distributor of automobiles, buses, parts and power-trains. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) CRM is a cross functional enterprise system that integrates and automates many customer serving processes in sales, marketing, and customer services that interact with a company’s customers. It also creates an IT framework of Web-enabled software and databases that integrate these processes with the rest of the company’s business processes. CRM helps companies to become customer-focused businesses. Why did Mitsubishi Motor decide to implement CRM? Executives felt that company lacked a customer focus. Customer service was very poor More than 18 service lines customers had to navigate to get help. Customer service department was costly and inefficient.
How did Mitsubishi Motor implement CRM? • • • • Formed a project team that included members from sales, marketing, finance and IT departments The team then set the rule on what type of CRM software they would implement and how it would be implemented. They choose to implement the best-of-breed software based on company needs, and not a CRM suite that would force the company to fit needs to the software. The team also decided to implement changes to current operations slowly, only adding another when employees were utilizing the last one.
The beginning of the journey • Mitsubishi started CRM in 1999 by outsourcing the most basic level customer service calls to Baltimore-based Sitel Corp., and their 18 service lines and call centers condensed to one using “call center software” by