Thank you for Subscribing to Auto Business Outlook Weekly Brief
What are the changes and challenges that you currently face and resolve in customer experience management with respect to the mobility sector?
Automotive customers usually do not make impulsive purchasing decisions. They invest significant time, energy, research, and effort into buying a car. We must deliver an enhanced experience across the entire customer journey to satisfy them. One epic failure after 10 or 12 disparate great experiences will make the consumer walk away. On par with the industry, we at Hyundai have been laying the foundation to provide this holistic customer experience for many years. Our goal is not to create great one-off experiences but to manage the entire landscape of experiences so that we don’t make a bad experience at any point in our customer interaction. To facilitate it, we have a ‘macro journey map’ that gives us a broad understanding of how customers interact with us at a broad level. The customers’ journey with us begins when they consider an automotive purchase. The second stage comes when they start researching and prioritizing certain types of cars. The customers then go through a purchasing and ownership journey. The average cycle of car ownership differs from country to country. During that tenure, customers would have to maintain the car, service it, and engage in other ownership activities. There is also a new element in this macro map where they don’t own but instead rent their cars. We’d have to consider all sorts of these business or ownership models that are part of future mobility. Overall, it’s how we manage these thousands of touch points and offer a holistic customer experience that matters in the end. What do you think has changed in the automotive digital experience management landscape over the years? Through our numerous internal discussions, we have concluded that digital customer experience has dual aspects. One is the experience that is innately digital. When the customer accesses us through the web or other digital channels, the touchpoint is digital in nature. But there’s more to it. “Our goal is not to create great one-off experiences but to manage the entire landscape of experiences so that we don’t make a bad experience at any point in our customer interaction.” We define digital as anywhere the data is created, either online or offline. It doesn’t depend on whether the touchpoint itself is digital or not. For instance, let’s say a customer visits us at a pop-up store that we set up in a mall for two weeks to display our products. There’d be someone to give information about the car to passers-by. If we didn’t collect any information from customers via that person, then it’s not digital at all; it’s completely offline. But what if the person says, “Hey, if you’d like to receive more information, give us your email id.” From the point we receive that email id, it becomes a digital touchpoint. Whether it’s digital or not thus heavily depends on data. Without data, there is very little we can do from a management perspective. If that salesperson memorizes the customer’s phone number or email id instead of recording it, there is very little we can do about it. But when the person keeps the information, logs into our CRM platform, and records the data, the whole process becomes digital in nature. We generally talk about customer experience management as some content we deliver or certain experiences we offer to customers. However, customer experience management really happens when data and digital is involved. Can you elaborate on any of your recent initiatives that supplement customer experience management? One of our main initiatives is on the CRM side, and the other is on our websites. We are revamping our CRM across the globe, transforming it. When it comes to websites, traditional automotive OEM websites or digital brochures do not have any interactive functionality. They display a bunch of cars, their information, and so forth. They didn’t have any functions like logins, the ability to purchase cars, or request services online. Before five years or so, even the automotive companies that claimed to have these features then were mainly relying on manual work in the background. They’d collect information from digital forms and process it manually behind the stage. In recent years, websites have been transforming from nice pretty brochures into functioning websites, where they can receive orders, allow customers to manage their cars online, track services, and just about anything you’d expect from highly sophisticated product ownership. Along those lines, we are revamping our entire landscape of websites across the globe. We have around 170 websites in total across different countries in different languages. We are going to orchestrate the whole bunch. These are our two main initiatives. We are also continuously working on the personalized marketing side. When we think of automotive advertisements, TV ads come to our minds first. While we will continue doing TV ads, we will also focus more on digital viewership. That way, we can offer personalized, targeted ads to customers. In fact, Hyundai is so sophisticated at targeting our ads that even companies like Google are pretty impressed with it. But it’s done rather quietly. As a consumer, you see what you were targeted for without even realizing so. And we get great results from it. What would be your advice to the industry leaders planning and strategizing their customer experience initiatives? When Steve Jobs decided to create the Apple Store, most of the industry was skeptical about it. I think, what most people tend to forget is to look at customer experience from a holistic perspective. Reiterating my earlier point, it’s not about delivering great one-off experiences but rather a connected, holistic experience. But it requires years of grit and diligence to lay the foundation for it. Referring to my analogy again, what's different about the automotive industry from the smartphone industry is its complex infrastructure with legacy businesses and processes. Changing a car's engine when standing still and changing it when it's in motion at 50 mph is different, right? So, never underestimate the complexity of achieving this goal in the automotive industry. However, there have also been times when we have built from scratch. For instance, we launched an online car sales business in Korea through which we only sell one model, Casper, a crossover city car. We made the whole process cheap and fast. The experience of purchasing and owning it was so different for customers. While certain new players, which have recently entered the market, claim to put forth benchmarking customer experience, that’s far from reality. The industry in general, and our company in particular, are steadily overcoming the legacy infrastructure in place and responding to the evolving customer needs. You can expect a lot of great and fun things in the course of the next two-to-three years.