Time to Level Up

Non-automotive players are setting CX benchmarks in the automotive industry, pushing for radical change, and putting increased pressure on traditional OEMs.
 

CX as a critical success factor in the automotive industry

The hype surrounding the potential offered by customer experience (CX) has reached all players in the mobility market. CX is one of the most critical factors for long-term success. However, major automotive OEMs are still struggling to provide their customers a holistic and superior experience, which goes beyond the actual vehicle-related experience.

Customer insights: quantifying CX performance

To better understand the current landscape and identify the most relevant CX drivers, we recently surveyed 2,000 customers across five markets. We did this by using both experience and Net Promoter Scores (NPS) as key metrics to assess customer satisfaction. Our research highlights the potential for automotive OEMs to meet and improve customer expectations:

•  Customer experiences have a strong impact on customer loyalty, with improved pre- and aftersales experiences yielding increased loyalty scores of up to 17%
•  Experience scores show optimization potential along the entire customer lifecycle
•  In-car experience is harmed by insufficient connectivity

Insights from the customer survey indicate multiple experience gaps for different customer journeys and touchpoints along the entire lifecycle. OEMs need to understand these gaps and their key drivers to adjust accordingly. Despite car manufacturers already starting to shift their focus, they still have a long way to go. With the introduction of various Direct-to-Consumer (D2C) activities, such as sales model transformations, responsibilities are shifting to importers and or OEMs, offering great potential for CX improvement.

Autonomous Driving (AD) is propelling CX

The need to create outstanding experiences is gaining even more relevance when put in context with autonomous driving – the key trend appearing on the horizon that is set to become part of our day-to-day life within the next 10 years. New superior experiences enabled with every additional AD level increase technical complexity, but also open opportunities for OEMs to unlock potential and tap into new profit pools. The development of AD offers a sheer myriad of options enabling new customer experiences at each level. This is because the vehicle can take over an ever-increasing part of the driving task, giving more free time to drivers and passengers.

Based on our research, customers look forward to being able to relax, sleep, or work. Considering this, only those who master the demanding technical software-driven challenge while communicating trust in the system and its vehicle will be rewarded with satisfied customers.

Ultimately, the argument for improving CX is simple: better CX makes for happier customers, which in turn leads to improved business performance. The focus should be on CX initiatives that impact customers the most to yield higher returns.

It’s time to level up!

Automotive OEMs are struggling to overcome several challenges, ranging from low prioritization and insufficient organizational structure to missing end-to-end orchestration. But so far, many OEMs have not been able to successfully shift their focus on CX.

It is time to master the CX challenge – future success depends on it. Time is of the utmost importance, especially as many automotive OEMs are currently working intensely on car generations for 2025 and beyond. These vehicles will go to market with a new operating system, making software and connectivity increasingly important. Tomorrow’s successful OEMs will be those that make CX a strategic priority and transform into a successful holistic customer-centric organization, adapt their development processes, leverage customer insights, and build a solid technical software-driven foundation to enable new experiences. If they can hit all these milestones, they will be the ones making the decisive difference on the racetrack.

Are you ready to win the race for customers?

For more details download Capgemini Invent’s latest report TIME TO LEVEL UP, focusing on customer experience in the automotive industry

Authors: Sebastian Tschödrich, Anne Junge, Sherif Hussein