Southeast Toyota Distributors is the world’s largest independent Toyota distributor, catering to Alabama, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina.
After already investing in Salesforce Sales Cloud and Community Cloud, they knew the tool was capable of much more than they were using it for, but they didn’t have the knowledge and capabilities to advance its use to its fullest, most strategic capacity.
They also lacked an internal Salesforce team — and important knowledge about the platform. The underutilization of the platform made it hard for Southeast Toyota to track the customer journey, streamline business processes using features like chatbots, and access essential data for strategic decision-making.
Their customer communication was impeded, too. Without effective Salesforce implementation, Southeast Toyota was answering every customer support message manually. Customers inundated employees with these messages — which were often simple, like password reset requests — which furthered frustration on both ends and wasted valuable time.
With these challenges persisting, the organization needed a partner with Salesforce expertise who would take the time to learn their business and respond to its needs.
Southeast Toyota partnered with Centric due to our proven success as a Salesforce partner. As the first step in our partnership, our team conducted an assessment of Southeast Toyota’s Salesforce instance to identify areas where they were underusing the tool.
We then used this information to compile our insights and recommendations, which we reviewed with the client. After considering their goals and feedback in this initial engagement, we created a proposal, which involved a range of quick wins, streamlined processes and strategic upgrades. Our strategic plan included training employees across multiple departments — including Dealer Services, Market Rep, Distribution, Accounting, PDC, VPC and Warranty Teams. We also proposed a Lightning Conversion — a strategic upgrade that automates common transition tasks.
This training included:
The goal was to help each department maximize its Salesforce capabilities to streamline business processes and use the platform to increase efficiency and impact to Dealers.
“The team reviewed individual processes within each department and provided great feedback and opportunities available through the tool,” said Daniel Ramati, Southeast Toyota’s Salesforce product team owner.
With our help, Southeast Toyota is now using Salesforce in several mission-critical areas.
After working together, Southeast Toyota’s team now uses forms, as well as reporting and dashboards for tracking purposes, across multiple departments. Expanding utilization in these areas has made it easier for Southeast Toyota employees to gather customer data, collect signatures and more.
Specifically, we helped build out dynamic reports and dashboards that allow Southeast Toyota’s teams to see Dealer requests in real time. Additionally, this helps them understand where resolutions are stalling. We also helped the team implement a Service-Level Agreement (SLA) process with their Dealer Services team to track and monitor response times and resolution times across Dealerships.
We also recommended and implemented Salesforce flows and community forms to enable Southeast Toyota to provide dealers with forms on their mainframe. They can use these forms to create support tickets, which the system will create and route into the Southeast Toyota Salesforce organization.
With these new forms, departments including Market Rep and Distribution were able to streamline their processes with Salesforce automation. Southeast Toyota was also able to start using their community for Dealers, enabling them to monitor current cases, chat with associates and use knowledge base information.
“We were able to migrate from website forms and APIs to utilizing Salesforce to include the forms externally for our Dealers,” Ramati said.
Salesforce is no longer a place to simply store customer information. Thanks to our team training, Southeast Toyota employees know how to leverage essential insights about vehicle owners and buyers to power stronger sales and marketing decisions. Moreover, this training led to more teams and departments using Salesforce, ensuring that essential customer information reached more internal stakeholders.
Our Salesforce experts are also currently working with Southeast Toyota’s Dealer Services team to develop a chatbot function. This will create a user-friendly, self-serve model for customers who have simple requests like password resets.
We provided data analysis illustrating the different reasons Southeast Toyota’s Dealers were contacting them. “From that analysis, Centric recommended and created complex chat and chatbot functionality to help offset many of the support requests that only needed simple responses and details,” Ramati said.
The Southeast Toyota team expects the chatbot update to bring a wealth of benefits to the Dealer Services department. “Once implemented, we expect to see many issues being resolved without the need of our teams. This will allow for more flexibility in planning and innovation for our future,” said Ramati. He added that they’re already working on expanding this valuable function to other departments.
Using Salesforce to its full potential has enabled Southeast Toyota to make more strategic decisions while saving time and money across over 200 Salesforce users with Southeast Toyota and over 500 dealership contacts accessing the community at a given time.
