How to increase sales in a shrinking market due to new IT solutions, Rolf Group

Denis Levchenko, Director of Digital Transformation and Mobile Technologies, Rolf Group

Rolf Group is the number one company in the retail market. The company was founded in 1991. ROLF's brand portfolio includes 22 car brands. The company's dealer network includes 59 showrooms and 3 megamalls of used cars in Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Businesses constantly have a large number of wants and requirements for IT systems due to the changing needs of the customer. It is critical for businesses to understand where they are on the radar for the customer and how successful they are in meeting their needs.

In order to drive sales, especially when the market is shrinking, and still grow revenue, we need to be driven by customer needs and lifestyles. Based on observations of customer behavior and expectations, we can anticipate their needs. And do it in such a way that the customer is not annoyed by anything. After all, often a small stimulus, the contact of a friendly salesperson, is not enough for a customer to make a decision.

How do we drive digital transformation across the company to improve IT efficiency, shorten transaction cycles, increase staff productivity, improve our customer satisfaction, and make business domains drivers of revenue?

Below is the experience of such transformation in Rolf Group, where colleagues were able to achieve a threefold increase in wallet share on the existing customer base within 10 months.

Briefly about the case

Analysis of As Is business processes led to the conclusion that inefficiencies in existing IT systems and processes lead to long transaction cycles, low staff productivity and customer dissatisfaction. The top reason for dissatisfaction (56%) is everything is long.

An analysis of existing IT systems showed that the company's IT landscape, based on a monolithic architecture, is severely outdated. Employees work in several dozen systems that are difficult to learn and understand. Processes are not formalized and last too long. The backlog for customizations and redesigns is over a year, and IT is not implementing the features that the customer and the business want from it.

It was decided to move away from a monolith and build everything on a microservice architecture deployed in the cloud with containerization on Cybernates. UX/UI development for users should be done in-house. Make the system customizable, quickly upgradeable and modifiable to meet the needs of the business and customers. Create a unified front end for employees, seamless across the entire transaction cycle that touches multiple business verticals.

From the point of view of business processes, they were formalized, logging of actions was introduced to evaluate efficiency, Rolf-ID as a single end-to-end knowledge about clients in the system, sales algorithms were automated to equalize the level of salespeople. And most importantly, a predictive model was created on the basis of CRM, which identifies the most probable need of each particular client at any given time and gives a recommendation to the salesperson on what should be offered now.

As a result, already at the MVP stage, they tripled (!) the sales volume on the pilot sample on the existing client base and reduced the time spent by clients on a single transaction by 2-3 times.