OLX India is India’s leading classifieds marketplace for cars, motorbikes, mobile phones, household items, jobs, and real estate. The company has driven the growth of the pre-owned car industry in India by empowering hundreds of thousands of people to buy or sell pre-owned cars easily. Today, OLX commands 80% of the pre-owned cars market share, and estimates that most pre-owned cars sold in India go via OLX in one way or the other.
Sunny Kataria, VP, OLX Group, talks about the role that Salesforce plays in charting OLX’s growth story. “We spend a lot of time talking to our customers, analysing their journeys, and finding ways to make their experience with us as easy and streamlined as possible. Salesforce enables us to listen more closely to the needs of our consumers, and innovate to serve them better,” he says.
Scaling up in a customer-centric manner
In 2018, in addition to our online platform, OLX announced the launch of our offline vertical – OLX Autos, which would source pre-owned cars from sellers, to auction them to empanelled channel partners.
We wanted to ensure that customer experiences across our offline retail channels were just as seamless as its online ones. When our sales teams went out and met dealers, it was essential that they weren’t just rattling off a list of products, but were actually providing thoughtful and personalised recommendations based on a thorough understanding of every customer.
We saw the need for a mature CRM platform to optimise the performance of our sales teams while also providing a great customer experience. In order to achieve these objectives, we needed a robust CRM system.
We quickly realised that as we scaled up to all our 45 locations worldwide, we would need robust global support in terms of integrations, multilingual capabilities, and more. Salesforce checked all those boxes.
Leveraging data to increase efficiency and build richer customer experiences
On any given day, OLX India caters to over one million buyers and sellers in the pre-owned cars segment. Each month, these users generate over seven billion page views. Meanwhile, the company’s auto team has sales staff spread across 89 cities in India to cater to the needs of customers and business sellers across geographies.
Taking into account the massive number of customer touch-points and volumes of data generated every day, we implemented Salesforce Sales Cloud to automate our sales processes— ranging from lead and order management, to account and payment management, as well as dealer onboarding and activation.
By consolidating customer data in one system, the sales teams are able to quickly see which customer accounts are due for renewal—or which dealers among hundreds of thousands need to be followed up with on an opportunity. The teams have granular visibility into customer purchases, new posting of cars online and other activities on the OLX platform. The consolidated information also helps the sales team to identify opportunities for upselling and cross-selling newer products and services.
Salesforce enables the company to have more meaningful, relevant, and personalised conversations with our customers. With visibility into tailor-made offers for each customer, the company’s teams are better equipped to delight customers, and drive higher conversions. Salesforce tools have also increased overall team productivity. With automated processes freeing up their time, the sales team is able to engage with customers better. The number of customer visits per sales person per day has increased by over 35%— which is an industry benchmark.
Salesforce has also made it easier for the management team to track sales performance. Rich analytics dashboards offer us a granular and in-depth view of the business. We can instantly see how many customer visits it takes to acquire a new account, and then compare those numbers across key markets such as, Delhi vs. Mumbai. This kind of benchmarking helps us identify new opportunities for efficiency and monetisation.
As OLX’s sales productivity has improved, so has its business growth. In FY19, the company reported a 123% rise in revenue. OLX Autos alone has witnessed healthy month-on-month growth rates of 15% and has expanded to75 stores across 17 cities.
Today, OLX Autos has a strong presence of 150+ stores across 17 cities.
Enabling enterprise-wide adoption of Salesforce
For any IT implementation to be successful, it has to be whole-heartedly adopted by employees. At OLX, we positioned Salesforce as a platform that would empower our sales teams to build better connections while increasing sales.
To ensure that Salesforce was adopted successfully across the enterprise, OLX identified Salesforce Champions, who shared their experiences of leveraging Salesforce tools and how it helped them have more personalised conversations. With this exercise, other employees were also motivated to use Salesforce. A lot more people started feeding data on customer interactions and other details into Salesforce.
The input parameters such as daily customer visits logged by field sales have improved by 75%. In addition, the percentage of offline sales that occur without field visit data being entered into the system has dropped to just 3%. Overall, as the teams get a better view into their interactions with customers, we have witnessed an increase of productivity and opportunities for conversion.
Simplifying customer service
OLX has also implemented Salesforce Service Cloud to support the tele calling division which helps businesses advertise their products and services on the classifieds platform.
Tele calling agents use Service Cloud to manage the entire process of selling ad subscriptions to customers. The solution provides comprehensive visibility into customer invoices, contracts, subscriptions, and other data to enable effective customer service.
With Service Cloud, OLX is strengthening customer delight. Soon, we plan to deploy Salesforce solutions for ticket management and case resolution across 20 countries.
India leads the way
As one of the largest consumer markets globally, OLX India is sharing our learnings and success stories with other OLX teams globally.
Salesforce has now been implemented in multiple markets that OLX is present in. The solution was templatised for quick and seamless adoption in OLX contact centres across Malaysia and the Philippines, as well as for sales teams in Latin America and the EU.
OLX India is at the top of its game today. And at the heart of its success is a customer-centric approach and commitment to constant innovation. .
We want to offer solutions deeper down the value chain to make the whole customer journey smooth and effortless. We also want to strengthen the interplay between our online and offline businesses, so that customers have a seamless experience. Salesforce will be instrumental in achieving these objectives.