Grupo Q: Driving for excellence in customer experience and engagement
Explore Grupo Q’s journey with SAP
A leader in automotive sales and maintenance services for 70 years, Grupo Q represents 15 prestigious automotive brands across Central America. Seeking to satisfy increased customer demands and deliver a truly optimal customer experience in line with its strategic goals, the company adopted the SAP Sales Cloud and SAP Service Cloud solutions.
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| Automotive | San Salvador, El Salvador | 3,051 employees |
Innovation Leader, Grupo Q
Creating a single view of the customer
For 70 years, Grupo Q has grown its reputation as a leading distributor of well-known vehicle brands across Central America. In Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama, the company has exclusive distribution rights for Nissan, Hyundai, Cadillac, Chevrolet, Mazda, Peugeot, Jeep, Isuzu, RAM, and GWM, among others. The company also offers preventive and corrective maintenance services for the different brands of vehicles it distributes in the region.
Aspiring to be among the best automotive companies in the world, Grupo Q is an innovative and proactive operator that seeks new ways of delivering richer customer experiences.
Having grown through mergers and acquisitions over many years, Grupo Q lacked a single “golden record” of each customer in terms of correct address information, e-mail details, phone numbers, and more. Duplicate records in its database challenged its ability to track customer behavior and purchase history. At the same time, the company lacked robust lead and opportunity management capabilities. When leads were created, there wasn’t a strict workflow for contacting the customer and sharing that information with the team.
Without a unified system to uniquely identify customers and track their interactions, Grupo Q was losing opportunities to serve customers and meet their needs.
Innovation Leader, Grupo Q
Keeping in step with changes in customer behavior
To develop a unified data model and support a single view of the customer, it was critically important for Grupo Q to integrate sales and service data with its ERP application to create one source of truth. So, to pave the way to better customer engagement through omnichannel communications on any device, it sought a cloud-based solution.
To get there, the company considered two possible options. It could further develop its in-house customer relationship management (CRM) solution to meet its growing needs, or it could add to its portfolio of cloud solutions from SAP. After a thorough evaluation of these options and consideration of the faster time to value offered by SAP software, Grupo Q chose to adopt the SAP Sales Cloud and SAP Service Cloud solutions. SAP Sales Cloud streamlines and automates critical selling processes and empowers the sales team with intelligent recommendations. SAP Service Cloud is an advanced customer service tool that helps organizations provide fast, reliable, and personalized service across channels. These cloud solutions from SAP support harmonized CRM processes while aligning with the company’s commitment to continuous innovation, as new features and functionality are available for adoption at regular intervals.
Innovation Leader, Grupo Q
Making service a critical component of the customer experience
Following the adoption of SAP Sales Cloud and SAP Service Cloud, Grupo Q has transformed its customer sales and service organization, empowering its teams to better collaborate on vehicle sales and service contracts.
On the service side, the organization has gone from being considered a cost center that handled complaints to being viewed as a profit center. It now plays a more strategic role in the business, with proactive service, faster resolutions, and a closed feedback loop as the centerpiece of exceptional customer experiences.
Having streamlined and automated critical selling processes, the sales team has evolved from being order takers to performing more of an advisory or consultative role. Thanks to visibility into real-time data, sales reps can now engage with customers and prospects in meaningful ways and make relevant cross-sell, up-sell, and down-sell recommendations. With SAP Sales Cloud in place, Grupo Q has more visibility over customer visits and the interactions its sales reps have with them. And the workflow involved from placing sales orders to sending out invoices and receiving payments is automated, connected, and documented, leaving more time for sales and service reps to engage with customers.
During the time of COVID-19, having a sales and service foundation built on cloud technology allowed the company to adapt at speed. Gustavo Adolfo Arias Masis, innovation leader at Grupo Q, comments, “Our customer service agents and sales reps had everything they needed to work remotely, from any device. They could view a detailed and up-to-date profile of each customer and see at a glance whom they should talk to and when the perfect time for a conversation might be.”
In another example, when Grupo Q’s business in Guatemala grew from 20 to more than 340 people, SAP Sales Cloud and SAP Service Cloud again proved to be valuable. Masis notes, “For these new hires, having access to real-time customer information and intuitive systems helped get them up to speed quickly. This, in turn, smoothed the sales and service process and maintained the continuity of a great customer experience.”
Innovation Leader, Grupo Q
Creating new efficiencies for increased customer satisfaction
As Grupo Q continues on its sales and service transformation journey to heighten the customer experience, its next focus is to complete its 360-degree view of the customer. The company is also exploring the use of AI-based chatbots for customer service from SAP partner Sinch AB.
By gaining a single view of its customers and enabling its sales and service organizations to run at optimal levels on SAP Sales Cloud and SAP Service Cloud, Grupo Q is championing sales excellence and finely tracking sales and service interactions with customers. Using one system across the organization allows the company to maximize its response to customer queries and complaints while also providing opportunities to create leads.
Elsewhere, the company is looking to improve employee engagement, motivation, and retention by further modernizing employee experiences. It is also working on building resilience in its supply chain.