Zoho CRM fuels Carsome to provide a seamless car buying and selling experience

The company

Founded in 2015, Carsome is Southeast Asia's largest integrated automotive ecommerce platform and revolutionizes the way people buy and sell cars. Carsome started as a reliable platform dedicated to streamlining the used car selling process for customers. By booking an online appointment, users can receive a detailed car condition report within just 30 minutes. Once a sale is confirmed, Carsome takes care of all the paperwork, including car inspections, ownership transfers, and financing—making the entire process hassle-free.

Throughout nine years of operations, Carsome has transformed the traditional used car selling experience by eliminating common pain points for consumers and dealers. This commitment to excellence has resulted in an impressive milestone: the sale of over 500,000 cars.

With operations spanning Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Singapore, and the Philippines, the company operates more than 80 Carsome centers in over 50 cities and partners with a robust network of 30,000+ dealers. By digitizing the used car industry, Carsome is reshaping and elevating the car buying and selling experience across Southeast Asia.

The challenge

Mansour Safarzadeh, Regional Project Manager at Carsome, recalls, "After a few years in business, depending on multiple standalone applications, Carsome's management recognized the need for a unified platform to streamline operations. Our systems were fragmented, with teams relying on different applications and scattered Excel sheets to manage workflows."

This disjointed approach made collaboration inefficient and hindered productivity. "We wanted an integrated system to simplify operations and improve employees efficiency," Safarzadeh adds. This realization led management to seek a solution provider who could unify operations and enhance customer data and experience management across channels.

Why Zoho

After evaluating multiple vendors, including Salesforce and Zendesk, Zoho emerged as the clear choice for several key reasons:

• Exceptional support from Zoho and its partner
• A unified platform offering robust functionality at an affordable cost
• Intuitive and user-friendly interface
• Easy adoption with minimal learning curve and hassle

Zoho's combination of features and support made it the ideal solution for their needs.

The solution

Carsome onboarded with Zoho, marking the beginning of their journey towards an easier and smoother employee experience. This, in turn, empowered Carsome to provide an excellent customer experience to their massive client base.

They started their journey with Zoho CRM and Zoho Desk to manage all their customer interactions and data in a single, well-integrated platform. Carsome quickly moved to CRMPlus, a bundle of applications that all serve to manage every aspect of the customer experience. This transition enabled them to manage every client touchpoint efficiently and save time by eliminating manual work. "We saved about 13 to 14 hours per agent per month," Safarzadeh says.

"Zoho CRM is one of the main applications we use at Carsome," says Krithiga Nair, Customer Service Manager at Carsome. "It helps us manage all our incoming leads and allows us to be proactive in our outreach."
To improve their efficiency even further, Nair says, they've integrated their CRM with SalesIQ. "This integration allows us to concurrently handle all the live queries coming in from the website."

Zoho CRM is also integrated with an internal CMS platform at Carsome. The data sync between these two is paramount for the company, as it serves as the entire company's database.

Another highly important component for Carsome has been ZoBot, powered by SalesIQ, which has enabled them to address their most important lead source: WhatsApp. Whenever a lead comes through WhatsApp, ZoBot addresses the request by sending automated responses and FAQ links. If the prospect needs any further assistance, it connects them with a live agent. ZoBot integrates with Zoho CRM, where it automatically creates leads. Before this integration, agents had to add leads manually after every interaction.

Carsome has been very innovative in finding the right approach to provide the best possible customer experience and improve conversion rates. In order to observe which strategy works best, the team uses Zoho Analytics, which syncs with Zoho CRM. This sync enables them to track metrics and determine the best strategies to implement for their teams. Some examples of these metrics include correlations between the point of first contact and point of conversion and customer turnaround time.

Carsome uses Zoho Desk to handle clients' complaints and questions as well as initial inquiries that come in through various social media channels—all of which, again, are synced back into Zoho CRM, where all their data is centralized.

Zoho and Aplikasi: A dynamic duo

A significant factor in Zoho's success with Carsome is our partnership with Aplikasi, a Premium Zoho Partner.

"Carsome was unlike our other clients—they came with specific requirements and a clear vision of what they wanted to achieve with Zoho," says Nik Khairul, Chief of Growth and Delivery at Aplikasi. "We initially started as their support partner, but as they saw the value in our work, we evolved into their implementation and customization partner for Zoho applications."

Key highlights of Aplikasi's contributions to Carsome include the following:

• Seamlessly transitioning Carsome from individual Zoho applications to Zoho CRM Plus and enabling a more unified approach to customer experience management.
• Shifting from custom modules to the standard Deals module, thereby improving access to historical client data and unlocking advanced CRM capabilities.
• Migrating approximately 700,000 records from custom modules to the Deals module with precision and minimal disruption.
• Developing and embedding live chat support directly into Carsome's mobile applications and enhancing real-time customer engagement.

This collaboration has been instrumental in Carsome's ability to leverage Zoho's full potential and drive operational excellence.

Benefits and ROI

• Automating manual tasks has helped Carsome save between 75 and 100 man-hours each week.
• Zoho's well-integrated system helps the Carsome team achieve synergy.
• Carsome has improved efficiency by automating lead inflow from channels like their website, phone calls, and WhatsApp.
• ZoBot provides automated client responses for Carsome after work hours.
• Zoho offers a comprehensive view that helps users avoid having to toggle between apps.