After smaller ticket consumer items, groceries and food, now even cars will get delivered at your doorstep, without you having to visit the dealer showroom even once, if you are residing in the major metro cities. To add to the convenience of the consumers, the country’s largest passenger vehicle manufacturer, Maruti Suzuki India has advised some of its dealers to offer home delivery services. The company feels that this way it can make a good sales pitch to consumers who tend to postpone purchases due to lack of time. To begin with, the services are being offered in cities like Delhi-NCR, Mumbai and Bengaluru, and even some select tier-II towns. Shashank Srivastava, executive director, marketing and sales at Maruti Suzuki, said customers are offered doorstep delivery keeping in mind the convenience they seek. “This leads to creation of customer delight, thus ensuring their long-term association with the company,” Srivastava told FE. The way the system works is like this. Once a customer makes the booking online, an executive of the nearest dealer would get in touch and offer a test drive at the home address.
Subsequently, the loan process and payments would be facilitated and once the process is completed, the vehicle would be delivered. There’s a small catch though. The home delivery services would not be available if the loan for the vehicle is drawn on nationalised banks. The reason being their executives generally do not visit consumers at home for processing loans unlike the executives of banks in the private sector and non-banking financial companies. Maruti dealers said that loans through nationalised banks account for around 20% of the total vehicles sold via financing options.
While some dealers said they started offering the door step delivery service before the festival season, others said they have been offering it earlier too but was limited to select premium customers. Even as the number of customers availing this service currently is less, experts believe the model is sustainable in the long run and can give incremental volumes to the company. VG Ramakrishnan, managing partner, Avanteum Advisors LLP, said the decision is already taken by the customer before he visits a showroom and the only thing left is the test drive, which is also facilitated at the customers’ house. “This model can become mainstream if the supply happens directly through the manufacturers as it will also bring down the acquisition cost. Manufacturers can clearly target that section for whom time is more important than money,” Ramakrishnan said.
In August this year, the company started a service on wheels initiative, under which customers could avail repairs and maintenance services at their doorstep. The service, aimed at improving the ownership and after sales experience, utilises mobile vans – equipped with modern tools and new technology – to undertake service and repairs away from the service centres.
