Case Study: German Automaker achieves experience-driven customer engagement and 87% Salesforce cost reduction with Informatica

German Automaker Shifts Gears to Focus on Experience-Driven Customer Engagement

A Global 100 German automaker with a diverse portfolio of premium brands shifted from a manufacturing-focused model to experience-driven customer engagement. The company struggled with fragmented customer data across brand-specific systems (CRM, warranty, etc.), growing data volumes, and the need for a flexible, scalable architecture to deliver trusted analytics and personalized marketing.

Using Informatica (Data Engineering Quality, Intelligent Cloud Services and PowerCenter) the automaker parsed 90 million records into a Cloudera data lake and selectively imported cleansed, deduplicated records into Salesforce. The result was a single, accurate customer view that enabled targeted campaigns and timely analytics, reduced Salesforce application spend by 87%, improved operational resilience without doubling the data team, and provided a scalable foundation for future data growth.