After a few years in the automotive aftermarket industry, I realised soon that the customers were “multi-dipping” into the company’s resources and goodwill gestures such as free trips, cash discounts, free product cross sections, free trainings, free advertising sponsorships, free giveaways etc. Some of our larger distributors had a direct relationship with our German headquarter and in these cases, they received, in addition to what they were already receiving from the local offices, free customer support, sponsorship and subsidies directly from our German headquarters.
This situation persisted simply because the various functions in our local offices such as sales, product management, marketing and finance worked in silos and did not talk to each other as much as it was needed, especially with regards to the support they were individually delivering to the customers. The transparency in this area was also insufficient between the local offices and our German headquarters.
In order to understand the situation better, I took the lead and initiated a few discussions with our sales, product management and finance colleagues and we quickly came to the conclusion that there will be some savings for the company if we can bundle our entire customer support services to the distributors into “one package”.
I continued to work on this “one package” idea and eventually built the company’s new flagship customer loyalty program on this. I studied the rewards and loyalty programs of the airlines and the credit card companies. The concept was simple and effective: the more you spend, the more you get back.
For our industry, this meant the higher sales targets our distributors hit, the higher their rewards, which was already a concept in place in the company at that time. But I modified it further by not limiting it to only sales targets but any other preferred KPIs such as accepting our pricing policies, bundling of products, paying on time, taking shipment etc. Also I expanded the rewards from giving out cash discounts to include everything that the company was already giving away for free, into “one package”.
Following this concept, my marketing team put together an excellent pilot plan which combined VIP luxury trips, cash discounts and a sleuth of technical and marketing support activities, initially focusing only on our dominant brand Sachs. I hired an Australian designing agency to work on the branding and designing and it was called “Sachs Super Bonus Program”.
Our sales, product management and finance colleagues simply loved the program because it reduced their own individual efforts as everything was packaged into one simple standard program. Eventually we set-up “Boge Super Bonus Program” for our Boge brand and in time, we merged all the product loyalty programs into one single corporate loyalty program and called it “ZF Achievers”.
I cannot recall another automotive aftermarket company in the industry at that time running anything close to this. It was a ground breaking idea and achievement. The program was so successful that it ran for five consecutive years until I left the company.
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