Toyota Astra Motor: Paving the road towards better customer segmentation
About Toyota Astra Motor
Established in 1971, Toyota Astra Motor (TAM) is a 50-50 joint venture between Toyota Motor Corporation and PT Astra International. The company is the sole agent, distributor and importer of Toyota vehicles in Indonesia, and has been the country's best-selling car brand since 1997. TAM offers vehicles in a variety of segments, including city car, hybrid car, hatchback, multi-purpose vehicle, sport utility vehicle, sedan, sports car and commercial trucks. The vision is to be one of the best managed corporations in the Asia-Pacific, driving a mission of social and environmental responsibility.
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About Merkle
Merkle is a leading technology-enabled, data-driven customer experience management (CXM) company under Dentsu Group. For over 30 years, Fortune 1,000 companies and leading nonprofit organizations have partnered with Merkle to build and maximize the value of their customer portfolios.
Toyota Astra Motor developed an innovative customer data platform, improved conversion of leads to car sales by 4% and obtained a 50% boost in quality leads with Google Cloud.
Google Cloud results
- Increased profitability through a 4% increase in converting leads to car purchases
- Boosted competitive edge through 20% improvement in time required to convert a lead into a sale
- Enhanced operational efficiencies with 11.9% reduction in cost of obtaining customer leads
Experiences a 50% increase in quality customer leads
Toyota Astra Motor (TAM), a joint venture between Toyota Motor Corp and Astra International, is a leading player in Indonesia's automotive landscape. Seeking to increase its lead in one of Asia's hottest economies, TAM wanted to enhance collaboration with its network of more than 325 dealerships to expand its customer base and improve revenue margins in an increasingly competitive environment.
TAM aimed to capture previously overlooked business opportunities, doing so by working with dealers with direct access to customer leads, to deliver relevant marketing while better serving consumers. However, dealerships often had their own lead management systems or off-the-shelf solutions that resulted in siloed, offline data. To improve customer outreach, it was essential for TAM to bring together data systems and workflows into a single cloud-native platform for more relevant marketing.
To achieve this, TAM worked with Merkle, a customer experience management (CXM) company, to establish a comprehensive customer data platform (CDP) on Google Cloud. This would leverage powerful tools such as BigQuery, Cloud Composer, Google Analytics 4 and Display & Video 360. Together, these solutions enabled actionable data integration, empowering TAM to create relevant advertising through a better understanding of customer behaviors and preferences.
"We saw an opportunity to advance our role in Indonesia's car market by creating a state-of-the-art CDP on Google Cloud with Merkle. This lets us drive relevant marketing for client leads in tandem with our dealerships. To this end, we succeeded beyond expectations," says Hendra Syahputra, Research and Data Center Department Head, Toyota Astra Motor. "The power of these Google Cloud solutions in enabling insights generation unlocked major gains for us in lead generation."
"We saw an opportunity to advance our role in Indonesia's car market by creating a state-of-the-art CDP on Google Cloud with Merkle. This lets us drive relevant marketing for client leads in tandem with our dealerships. To this end, we succeeded beyond expectations. The power of these Google Cloud solutions in enabling insights generation unlocked major gains for us in lead generation."
—Hendra Syahputra, Research and Data Center Department Head, Toyota Astra MotorDriving more high-performing marketing with analytics
TAM and Merkle decided to tap Google Cloud for its reputation as a comprehensive, all-in-one solution, which enables the team to build the ideal CDP from the ground up. At the same time, Google Cloud provides the cloud flexibility the company needs. This is in contrast to the previous solution that bundled features, where TAM needed to pay upfront for the bundling, some of which were deemed non-essential for their requirements.
"Google Cloud lets us pick and choose the features based on our requirements, allowing us to reinvest these costs towards building the customer data platform," says Syahputra. "At the same time, Google Cloud is a holistic, comprehensive and fully integrated platform for solutions such as Google Analytics 4, Display & Video 360 and Firebase. This facilitated TAM and Merkle to nimbly create an intelligent customer data platform."
For TAM, this means owning a CDP that integrates both the offline and online customer journeys into one platform, therefore observing a more comprehensive profile of potential buyers. This would be achieved through a combination of richer lead information and targeted audience segmentation, based on factors such as demographics, preferences, behaviors, and spending habits.
TAM brought together data from various sources, including dealerships, website and app navigation, and traffic channels, such as social media. Cloud Composer optimized data integration from hundreds of dealerships and other sources by ensuring that various tasks in a data workflow are executed in the right order, at the right time, and under the right conditions.
The CDP ecosystem of Cloud Composer, Google Analytics 4, BigQuery, and Display & Video 360 also optimizes the platform for more curated marketing. For example, Google Analytics 4 allows TAM to monitor consumer behavior across websites and apps, such as viewed content and time spent on a page. Since it is fully integrated with BigQuery, this data can be fed into the machine learning data warehouse for real-time data analytics, for the company to identify high potential audience segments at an unlimited scale.
"The connection between Google Analytics 4 and BigQuery is a game changer for evaluating our campaigns," says Bayu Pujiono, Customer Data Platform Management Head, Toyota Astra Motor. "We can easily track user behavior and campaign performance in real time with Google Analytics 4. This data, which is then extracted and analyzed in BigQuery, also provides us with valuable insights, as well as unique scalability and flexibility."
Part of the activation phase involved deploying Display & Video 360. By integrating its refined audience segments with Display & Video 360, TAM can reach out to its target audience with greater precision than before, at the right moment, and across the most suitable digital channels.
With the advanced ad personalization of Display & Video 360, lead generation and conversion rates optimized, TAM saw exceptional results. These include a four percent increase in converting leads to actual car purchases, a 20 percent increase in speed in time required to convert a lead into a sale, 50 percent improvement in quality of leads as a result of relevant advertising, and 11.9 percent reduction in cost of obtaining customer leads.
"The connection between Google Analytics 4 and BigQuery is a game changer for evaluating our campaigns. We can easily track user behavior and campaign performance in real time with Google Analytics 4. This data, which is then extracted and analyzed in BigQuery, also provides us with valuable insights, as well as unique scalability and flexibility."
—Bayu Pujiono, Customer Data Platform Management Head, Toyota Astra MotorIntegrating on-premise infrastructure with Google Cloud for better customer experiences
Merkle played a crucial role in seamlessly integrating TAM's on-premise infrastructure with the CDP, which the firm felt it needed for meeting data compliance. By leveraging cloud-native technology, the CDP offered scalability and efficiency in handling data, while integration with the on-premise infrastructure ensured a comprehensive view of all customer information. This approach empowered TAM to respond swiftly to market dynamics, optimize lead generation and conversions, and foster stronger customer engagement.
"Leveraging Merkle's cloud capabilities, we fully support Toyota Astra Motor's CDP initiative to unify customer data, empowering dealers to make informed decisions within the Toyota ecosystem. Our overarching goal is to elevate customer satisfaction, boost business productivity, and drive profitability through a transformative customer experience."
—Arshad Rahman, CEO, Merkle IndonesiaMerkle designed and implemented the integration of on-premise infrastructure to Google Cloud dataflow for the customer journey. This focused on smooth interaction between on-premise data and online sources, such as social media or email marketing, to create a unified customer experience journey, while ensuring that all TAM securities protocols are met.
"Our cloud-based customer data platform seamlessly interacts with our on-premise environment, creating dynamic and secure data pipelines using Cloud Composer," says Syahputra. "The interaction between the customer data platform and our on-premise environment leverage the scalability, power and advanced analytics of Google Cloud, while maintaining the security, control and compliance necessary for customer data protection."
"The interaction between the customer data platform and our on-premise environment leverage the scalability, power and advanced analytics of Google Cloud, while maintaining the security, control and compliance necessary for customer data protection."
—Hendra Syahputra, Research and Data Center Department Head, Toyota Astra MotorDriving the future of mobility in Indonesia
TAM plans to facilitate the real-time integration of data and services with its dealership network in the future, using Apigee to automate and scale the management of APIs. This will be applied beyond the sales process to encompass the use of data across tasks, including after sales service, compliance, telematics data, and customer lifecycle. By effectively deploying Apigee, TAM hopes to optimize operations across its value chain with improved collaborative experiences with its dealerships.
TAM and Merkle are also planning to monitor driver behavioral patterns in real time through Google Maps, so TAM can achieve its vision of a total mobility solution that includes timely insight on maintenance and servicing needs. The teams are preparing to deploy Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) for auto-scaling microservices computing power, so as to accommodate dramatic fluctuations in traffic volume across Indonesia.
"Our objective is to engineer a total mobility solution for the future of Indonesia," says Syahputra. "In the next phase of our evolution, the adoption of Apigee and Google Kubernetes Engine will enable us to optimize our data integration across all business lines, as well as create nimble autoscaling solutions based on driver insight, to offer innovative mobility solutions that empower Indonesian drivers."
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Toyota Astra Motor
Established in 1971, Toyota Astra Motor (TAM) is a 50-50 joint venture between Toyota Motor Corporation and PT Astra International. The company is the sole agent, distributor and importer of Toyota vehicles in Indonesia, and has been the country's best-selling car brand since 1997. TAM offers vehicles in a variety of segments, including city car, hybrid car, hatchback, multi-purpose vehicle, sport utility vehicle, sedan, sports car and commercial trucks. The vision is to be one of the best managed corporations in the Asia-Pacific, driving a mission of social and environmental responsibility.
About Merkle
Merkle is a leading technology-enabled, data-driven customer experience management (CXM) company under Dentsu Group. For over 30 years, Fortune 1,000 companies and leading nonprofit organizations have partnered with Merkle to build and maximize the value of their customer portfolios.