Buying a car is much more than a financial decision and a trip to the dealership. Drivers have deep feelings about the car they select, and expectations that brands must live up to. Customer Experience (CX) remains at the heart of the car buying and owning experience for drivers and brands must consider every encounter with customers or potential customers as an opportunity to impact the ongoing relationship.
You have influence over customers from the first moment they see an advertisement that appeals to them to their first trip to your showroom, or even when they’re a passenger in your brand’s vehicle.
Car owners interact with a broad set of teams within an automotive company, from marketers all the way through to servicing teams at your dealerships. Meeting customer expectations at each of these different, critical moments will impact their long-term perception of your brand, and contribute to your brand’s ongoing growth. Recognizing that relationships are constant — not solely at the moment of a vehicle’s purchase — helps brand teams design a holistic customer experience approach that delivers the consistent experience customers want. CX insights help brand teams identify which elements are most important in driving loyalty and growth.
Car owners interact with a broad set of teams within an automotive company, from marketers all the way through to servicing teams at your dealerships. Meeting customer expectations at each of these different, critical moments will impact their long-term perception of your brand, and contribute to your brand’s ongoing growth.”
Here are five auto industry Customer Experience research strategies covering key areas where you can see the most impact:
1. Retention of customers you already have.
The ability to monitor the touchpoints that customers have with you (directly and indirectly) will help guide on optimization of relationships. Some of these can be developed through brand and advertising tracking, and others will be feedback gained after the critical moments during ownership – any warranty interactions, servicing visits that are scheduled. As well as keeping a close eye and understanding the reactions from customers, these programs of insight are designed to identify any at-risk customers early, enabling the brand to engage directly, create remedial actions, and prevent recurrences with other customers.
2. Share of Spend now and how to grow future spend.
How valuable is a customer to you? When thinking about customers, and the different types (e.g. who may buy different vehicle types) how important are they? Over the course of their car owning life, can you understand their total value? We believe that considering and modeling a Consumer LifeTime Value (CLTV) is a useful metric that can enable a brand to consider prioritizing development, deepen the understanding of the competitive environment and help brand decision makers think about customers in real terms.
3. Advocacy: where sharing is caring.
Car brands alongside many other categories have enthusiasts that are critical to a brand’s ongoing and future success. Finding ways to engage with them at critical moments to further drive loyalty, as well as providing a means of feedback provide powerful insights. Enthusiasts not only know what they like (and don’t like) they typically hold a large amount of historic knowledge. Finding them, engaging with their group (online and in person) can really build deep connections, as well as rich content that can help further develop a broader base of customers, and new angles and stories that are impactful throughout the brand’s communication channels.
4. Identifying Operational Efficiency.
With a sales + service lifecycle for a vehicle, ensuring that every interaction is not only positive, but also driven by Quality in a cost-effective manner is critical to efficacy and profitability. This can drive targets, set KPIs (at a dealer, regional or even national level), and work to identify where any inefficiencies take place. This can be at a very functional level such as cost of parts, through to the time it takes for certain steps to reach the conclusion of a positive sales interaction. When you create change, how are you monitoring the impact of that change, and what it means to the customer? If it’s a neutral impact on experience, but saves the business costs great, however what else could be implemented to turn that to a more positive moment from the customers POV?
5. Activate and embed!
Activation is a fundamental step – taking the learnings to ensure that these are a focus to continue delivering on the brand’s promise to its customers, but also ensure there is a clear connection to growth. This turns to embedding the learnings and driving change – without learning the lessons demonstrated by the elements above and creating behavioral & cultural shifts any improvements in the business are likely to be ineffective.
Auto brands will need to maintain an agile CX insights program in the next few years to track consumer demand, particularly when it comes to the new sets of challenges EVs will present. As the market shifts, the best way to ensure you’re adapting your CX approach correctly is to maintain an ongoing dialogue with customers.
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