arvato launches 'Rider Services®' Centre for Harley-Davidson

arvato loyalty services - one of Europe’s leading relationship and loyalty marketing agencies - has launched a multilingual contact centre for Harley-Davidson® to help drive sales of its authorised motorbike rentals, tours and training courses across EMEA.

The move is a major departure for Harley-Davidson, as previously these endorsed Rider Services® were handled directly by dealerships and third party tour operators.

arvato’s tri-lingual agents, who collectively speak English, German, Spanish, French, Dutch and Italian, will be taking online and telephone-based bookings from consumers across EMEA and driving sales of the services through a series of direct cross-sell campaigns across 2009.

The online booking system will also support all dealerships – over 70 by the end of 2010 - providing them with a user-friendly tool to manage all bookings.

Patrick Allsop, programme manager at arvato, said: "We have created the contact centre in record time - in just over seven months, we have trained dealerships on the ground in five countries in EMEA and established a fully operational central point of contact and unified booking system to support the uptake of Harley-Davidson’s key rider services.

"By planning the implementation process extremely carefully and working closely with the system builder – Rent-Centric - to create an easy-to-use online booking system for customers and dealerships, customers are now already booking the Harley-Davidson experience of their dreams."

Nigel Villiers – director of the Harley Owners Group (H.O.G) ® and Rider Services at Harley-Davidson EMEA said: "We’re excited about bringing together our rider services and now looking forward to reaching out to a whole new set of Harley enthusiasts through our centralised system.

"arvato has used its industry expertise and global network to put every stage of our campaign into action - from strategy, to delivery and analysis."

arvato also manages services for Harley-Davidson’s 100,000-strong Harley Owners Group (H.O.G.), including magazine fulfilment, retention programmes, centralised customer communications, event support and controlled payment methods.

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