San Mateo, CA — April 9, 2003 — Three new clients have signed up to use solutions from customer relationship management specialist Siebel Systems, the solution provider has announced.
The new customer wins include Spanish airline Iberia and divisions of automakers Volvo and Nissan.
Iberia is Spain's top airline and a leader in routes between Europe and Latin America. With gross income of $4.9 billion and net earnings of $170 million, it is also Europe's most profitable scheduled carrier.
The airline is implementing Siebel's e-business applications in a bid to improve passenger service and customer loyalty. Scheduled to be launched mid-2003, the Siebel solution implementation is spearheading the company's drive to transform customer service.
Iberia is implementing Siebel's Call Center and Marketing solutions to help the airline remedy some of the challenges it faces resulting from its storage of customer information in separate, disconnected systems. By streamlining its view of the customer, Iberia is hoping to be able to more efficiently share customer information among its customer service department, reservations department and loyalty program.
Siebel said its Call Center will integrate the data currently in these separate systems, creating a single customer view so that, regardless of the channel through which customers communicate with Iberia — the Internet, telephone, e-mail, post or face-to-face — the airline will maintain a consistent dialogue with every customer.
Iberia staff will be able to access customers' travel history with the airline, the status of outstanding travel inquiries and customers' status in Iberia Plus, the airline's loyalty program.
The airline will use Siebel's Marketing solution to segment its most-frequent flyers and other lucrative customers, as well as to execute, and evaluate the post-campaign effectiveness of, multistage, multi-channel marketing campaigns targeted at these and other customers.
"In the fiercely competitive airline market, it pays to know who your customers are," said Xabier de Irala, chairman and CEO of Iberia Group. "By connecting Iberia's customer-facing systems, the Siebel solution will provide the airline with unrivalled insight into customers' travel patterns, flight preferences and other Iberia services they use."
Volvo Improving IT Service
Meanwhile, Volvo has implemented Siebel's Service solution in a bid to improve the quality, effectiveness and responsiveness of its technology services division, Volvo IT, which provides the Volvo Group and its subsidiaries with technology solutions.
The Service solution connects more than 3,000 users in Volvo IT's Swedish headquarters and other sites in Europe, Asia and North and South America to a single view of Volvo staff and Volvo IT customers worldwide. Thirteen major help desks handle hundreds of thousands of technical inquiries each year — either by phone or via connected Volvo IT field service professionals. All inquiries are registered into a single, central system and are either solved directly by the local help desk or are escalated to another support group around the world, depending upon the time of day, the nature of the customer inquiry and the agent's expertise.
The single view provides quick access to the caller's profile, including the caller's operating environment, technical architecture, software license information and network topology. Siebel says that with this information, Volvo IT can identify where more education is required within a particular technology, pinpoint where additional resources need to be deployed or highlight weak spots in a staff member's individual technology environment.
Inge Forsberg, global process owner for IT support at Volvo IT, explained that the group is using the Service solution to help maintain internal satisfaction among IT users throughout the company. "Volvo IT does not have a monopoly on The Volvo Group's technology services," Forsberg said. "If service quality slips and the customers become dissatisfied, they will switch to one of our competitors."
Nissan Replaces Home-grown System
Finally, Nissan Motor Acceptance Corp. (NMAC) and its Infiniti Financial Service Division (IFS) have selected the Siebel Automotive Captive Finance Solution Set as the centerpiece for its Strategic Technology elevation Plan (SteP). As the financial services arm of Nissan North America, NMAC is pursing this strategic initiative in order to contribute to Nissan's overall corporate growth and profitability goals for the next several years.
NMAC and IFS purchase from their dealers throughout the United States retail and lease contracts for Nissan and Infiniti vehicles. NMAC also provides wholesale floor plan, equipment, capital and mortgage loan financing to Nissan and Infiniti dealers.
Nissan's three-year strategic blueprint for sustained global growth, "Nissan 180," calls for the company to sell an additional 1 million additional vehicles and achieve 8 percent operating margin and zero debt. To support these corporate objectives, NMAC must accommodate the higher sales volume, as well as increase its penetration in financing these vehicles.
"When we looked at our current environment — with our home-grown customer care applications and manual processes — we realized that we didn't have a system in place that could support this rapid growth," said Sean Hicks, senior manager and STeP communications manager. "After looking at the available options, it was clear that Siebel Automotive was the best fit for our needs."
Siebel said its Automotive solution's multi-channel capabilities would provide service agents with a complete customer contact history, regardless of whether the contact occurred by phone, e-mail, the Web, voice response or other means. The multimedia agent desktop consolidates all the customer interactions occurring across these channels and in turn provides the information necessary to answer inquiries and resolve issues. Therefore, whether customers are on the phone inquiring about the status of their accounts or making a lease payment online, they can receive personalized service that reflects their complete customer history with NMAC.
In addition, NMAC's use of Siebel's Marketing will help the company identify and work with customers as they evaluate new vehicle offers, the solution provider says. The software will help NMAC offer a consistent experience to customers across all "touch-points," regardless of where those customers are in the ownership cycle.
