“While autonomous vehicles, connectivity, electrification, and shared mobility (ACES) will ultimately compel fundamental changes across any OEM’s business model, its customer experience performance must advance to reflect these changes as they occur.”
This is taken from Driving the automotive customer experience toward the age of mobility, a McKinsey report published back in 2019.
The report adds that not only is electrification sparking this fresh demand on customer satisfaction, the new age of car buyers have different needs and wants from those of the past.
The report continues, “millennials will represent more than 45% of the potential car-buying cohort in 2025. They will thereby form the largest new-car-purchasing demographic, making it paramount that OEMs understand their preferences and adapt to them. That is why, over the next five to ten years, automotive players need to look beyond the automotive industry to anticipate the needs of this first generation of integrated-mobility customers”.
Three years on, one global pandemic later, where does the above extract leave you?
Whether you are an OEM eyeing up the possibility of an agency model, or an automotive retailer still very much in control of the buying journey, accurate data around customer sentiment and satisfaction has never been so important.
So much stems from the satisfied customer, from retention levels to increased revenue and lifetime value. For the retailer it means unlocking lucrative bonuses from the OEM and for the OEM it’s about domination in that ferocious battle of the brands.
One particular part of the customer journey on everyone’s agenda right now is Order to Delivery and one of the most significant and telling reasons for poor (or sub 100%) customer satisfaction scoring at point of handover – that moment the customer drives off into the sunset, perhaps never to return, is the gulf in communication post-order versus pre-order.
There is, in fact, a gap in all high-end, high-value buying journeys: order to handover.
Sales teams can’t handle the volume of customers sitting in this ‘dead zone’ and the manufacturers often can’t provide accurate delivery information anyway. It’s a very specific point in the buying journey that is fraught with danger, that can have short-term (orders cancelled) and long-term (lifetime value capped) implications.
But while there are many attempts to placate the customer; from irregular calls from the sales team or call centre, to generic, impersonal emails, there isn’t anything that is consistent, effective and scalable... until now.
AutoBuzz automates communication to customers from the retailer or OEM, whoever ‘owns’ the customer experience at this point, delivering data for the first time back to sales teams who can quickly ascertain whether a customer is likely to provide a poor customer satisfaction score or not.
Those customers who are labelled as ‘active’ because they are watching videos on paint protection, GAP insurance and accessories, for instance, are actionable and ready for a follow-up for this reason. But, also 'actionable' from the retailer are those who are inactive within this zone.
In fact, what we now know, is that those inactive or ‘vulnerable’ customers are more important than the active ones as they are the ones who are most anxious and disengaged.
But there is some good news. Based on the data we have uncovered through AutoBuzz, at the early stage of order to handover some 60% of dealers are on a trajectory to deliver a poor customer satisfaction score. Yet, dedicated, personalised communication, within a scalable framework, sees this drop to just 7% when the same group of customers reach the latter stages of their buying journey.
Reducing the pool of potentially dis-engaged customers by more than 80%.
And, the downward pattern is one that can be tracked alongside personalised communication. Halfway through the order to handover zone, that 60% of customers is reduced to 13% meaning that each time AutoBuzz delivers content, the likelihood of poor customer satisfaction falls.
This is actionable data in a point of the buying journey previously ignored or plugged with unscalable solutions that crumble when the volume grows or simply become too expensive. AutoBuzz, on the flip side, becomes more cost effective the higher the volume of customers in this ‘gap’.
There’s no doubt that the need to provide a robust framework for continually high customer satisfaction scores is invaluable. The question is, how do you unlock the data required to deliver this piece of work in a way that doesn’t distract the sales team or adversely impact monthly order numbers?
Get in touch today to demo the AutoBuzz platform and see what it could be doing for you right now.
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