The edited excerpts from the interview with Veejay Nakra, CEO – Automotive Division, M&M, on retail plans:
Q. What are the three core areas of focus for your dealer partners in a post-COVID world?
At Mahindra, we have realigned the entire traditional business model to address our customer needs and channel partners’ concerns. In times like these, our focus is on the well-being and safety of all our associates and of our dealers. Hence our three core areas of focus would be:
1. Digital Experience: By continuing to provide our customers unrestricted personalized experience as well as digital and contactless sales and service support;
2. Smaller outlets: By ensuring higher reach through smaller outlets and more service reach;
3. Enhancing efficiency of channel partners: By reducing the overall cost of operations and enhancing the efficiency of channel partners.
We are going closer to the customers through our next generation, smaller format compact showrooms and reaching out through both 2 and 4 wheeler mobile workshops.Veejay Nakra, CEO – Automotive Division, M&M
We also introduced ‘CustomerLIVE’, a live video streaming feature using which the service advisors can explain repair estimates to customers directly from the service bay.
Q. Is a smaller setup becoming the norm going forward – what percentage of sales outlets will be large, small, sub-outlets, and mobile outlets?
We have revisited a lot of our existing infrastructure to curb the cost of operation while bringing benefits to the customers and dealers. Today the cost of operating the big showrooms is significant and hence we are going closer to the customers through our next generation, smaller format compact showrooms and reaching out through both the 2 and the 4-wheeler mobile workshops.
In the rural markets we are strengthening our reach through our smart zip stores. Today with over 2,500 primary and secondary outlets we cover almost 71% of all rural talukas. What is even more interesting is that we are leveraging synergy with our farm division and in the process have added 475 new synergy outlets which will help us to reach out to the last mile more efficiently and cost-effectively. All these have helped us increase our share of business in the rural markets by 5 points to 53%.
Q. What are the other ways the dealer partners are trying to deal with the present crisis?
We have also upgraded our dealership infrastructure with all the new norms to take into cognizance the hygiene factors and provide utmost convenience to our customers.
Beyond realigning and revisiting our infrastructure, we have combined certain roles at the back end to improve the efficiency of people and get costs under control. During these challenging times, we have hand-held our dealers throughout and worked on dealer manpower for both sales and service.
Re-skilling of the existing employees has further helped improve productivity and enhance customer satisfaction. In addition, we have helped our dealers renegotiate their rentals and lease agreements to bring down the dealer’s cost of operation. The new norm and format have reduced costs by up to 20% through lower rentals, lower manpower cost and inventory carrying cost — the three main cost factors for our channel partners.
Note: All the data is an estimation based on the information received from various sources and extrapolated by ETAuto research.
Sales Outlet: Sales Outlet means all kinds of physical outlets/dealerships/touchpoints from where cars were sold.
Average Sales Revenue: This is based on the ballpark average selling price per unit multiplied by total units sold in a year divided by the number of outlets.
Average Selling Price Per Unit : This is an estimated price derived from the price range and the calculation done by ETAuto. It may differ slightly from the exact price.
More on ETAuto Car Retail Ranking Report 2021
