Royal Enfield rides on Microsoft Dynamics 365 to create new customer experiences

Hearing the unmistakable “thump” of a Royal Enfield motorcycle’s engine invariably brings forth images of traversing long open roads. Since 1901, when the first motorcycle was produced in the UK, to the present day as a proud Indian leisure motorcycling brand, Royal Enfield has captured the imagination of generations of riders.

Royal Enfield’s tryst with India began in 1949 with Madras Motors importing the motorcycles into the country. By 1977, all production moved to Enfield India with a manufacturing facility in Chennai. Acquired by the Eicher Group in 1994 and renamed to Royal Enfield Motors Limited, there are over 3.5 million Royal Enfield motorcycles on the road today, with close to 820,000 motorcycles sold in the financial year 2018-2019.

But maintaining the cult is no easy task.

“Our customers are our biggest assets and we want to be number one in our customer satisfaction,” says Sudhakar Bhagavatula, Chief Information Officer, Royal Enfield.

Royal Enfield was looking for a platform that could offer a frictionless experience to both its potential and existing customers at different touchpoints. The motorcycle manufacturer had a boutique solution in place, but it was impacting its staff’s efficiency.

A salesperson at a showroom would have to take notes while interacting with a potential customer and enter their details manually later. They didn’t have a way to capture customer interests, preferences, and feedback right in the moment of the customer’s in-store interactions. Similarly, service advisors would note down points on a piece of paper on the manual job card and generate an estimate manually.

“We needed a robust, scalable customer interaction system to cover the different touchpoints of Royal Enfield’s potential and existing customers. The experience had to be uniform, irrespective of whether it is a customer who comes to a showroom to checkout a motorcycle or one coming to get their Royal Enfield serviced,” Bhagavatula adds.

To make this vision come true, in 2019 Royal Enfield decided to move to Microsoft Dynamics 365. What attracted them the most about Microsoft Dynamics 365 was that it was a scalable cloud platform, which they could extend across their workflow both at the sales and after-sales service interactions.

Royal Enfield first implemented a pilot deployment for Microsoft Dynamics 365 with dealers in Bangalore, Chennai, and Hyderabad, where they were able to reimagine how their sales and service people approached potential and existing customers.

Armed with tablets and smartphones, salespeople on the floor now simply take the customer’s phone number and are able to get all details about them—whether they have interacted with Royal Enfield in the past over the internet or a test ride—and are able to pick up the conversation from there, instead of starting afresh. New inputs from the conversation are added directly to the Dealer Management System (DMS) to keep the customer’s profile updated, instead of having to input these details manually after the conversation.

The system helps salespeople better understand the customer and personalize to their needs.

The same experience has been replicated at the service centres as well. The security guard is now able to quickly clear a motorcycle for entry into the service centre using a mobile app and the service advisor can query the service history and create new job cards with an initial estimate instantly using a tablet to access Microsoft Dynamics 365.

Since the pilot, Royal Enfield has already rolled out Microsoft Dynamics 365 to 160 exclusive dealerships in India and is aiming to roll it out across its network of more than 1,000 stores by the end of the year. It has also rolled out Microsoft Dynamics 365 to Royal Enfield North America, which has multi-brand stores and plans to roll it out in Royal Enfield Thailand too.

“Microsoft Dynamics 365 has become the core, pivotal platform where we want to build more digital tools as another layer over it. We are excited about creating more experiences on the platform for our customers and dealers, to ensure we are number one in customer satisfaction,” Bhagavatula exclaims.