Customer experience: Talking is the easy part

As ‘customer experience’ become a buzzword in the car industry, two brands regarded as being good at wooing and then retaining buyers have warned it’s a lot easier to talk the talk than walk the walk.

The Australian car industry is going through fundamental change over the next three years as Ford in 2016 and Holden and Toyota the following year shut down their local manufacturing facilities.

They will become vehicle importers, competing against around 60 other brands for the private buyer and no longer guaranteed a bank of fleet sales based on local manufacturer status.

Ford has been the most vocal among the three manufacturers about its need to improve its ‘customer experience’, announcing various programs including a free loan car at every scheduled service.

Holden has also made it clear it recognises a need to keep customers happy, appointing a customer council to provide feedback in late 2014.

“There is a lot of cultural change that has to happen at the local manufacturers that have been fleet driven and pumped them (vehicles) out,” Mazda Australia managing director Martin Benders told motoring.com.au.

“Now it’s individuals they have to deal with and it requires a culture change and an attitude change and it’s not easy to do.”

Benders warned the current focus on ‘customer experience’ was changing customer expectations and required experience to manage.

“You can’t just overnight say the customers get whatever they want,” he warned.

“There is still a responsibility if someone rings up and says ‘what are you going to do about my flat battery? You have to take ownership of that and it’s either there is something wrong with the battery so we’ll fix it, or ‘you stuffed up, here’s a new one and the bill’.

“So you have to have the processes and the ability to manage that.”

In a separate interview Hyundai Australia chief operating officer John Elsworth — formerly a senior executive at Holden — said the essence of what car companies meant by customer satisfaction was simple.

“All we are trying to do is sell as many cars as possible, keep as many customers happy as possible and keep them coming back to buy another car. That’s it pretty much in a nutshell… I know there are a lot more complexities around that.”

He said facilities were important, but the people who staffed them were the key.

“It doesn’t matter whether you are talking about our business or the 165 (Hyundai) dealers, you can put up a fantastic building but if you populate it with the wrong people then the business will fail.

“So for dealerships, part of our responsibility isn’t bricks and mortar -- we get all that done because you have to do it — the people are the difference and it’s how we create people that have an intense customer focus.”

He revealed Hyundai was now recruiting staff from beyond traditional automotive-related areas such as hospitality in a bid to improve its customer satisfaction levels.

In 2014 Mazda secured top spot for the third time in five years and the second year in a row in the JD Power Customer Service Index, which measures how mass-market car companies are treating their customers post-purchase.

Mazda Australia commenced a program to improve its customer relations in the early 2000s and has earned widespread recognition within Mazda globally for its efforts and attention from its rivals.

“A lot of them (rivals) are looking at what we do,” Benders said.

“The changes we made were lots of small steps over 10 to 15 years and it doesn’t happen overnight. So it’s going to be a long road to hoe for some of these guys to turn round.

“And in some cases they can’t even get their head around it. They know where they want to be but they can’t even see the small steps. It’s a very different concept.”

Hyundai has been a major improver in the JD Power CSI, ranked fifth overall in 2014 after introducing a lifetime cap on vehicle servicing prices and a subsidised price for the first five services.

“We have had a major push on customer satisfaction over the last few years,” Elsworth confirmed. “Our results in the JD Power customer survey – we were ninth, we are fifth, we will be top three — I guarantee we will be top three, because that is our goal, because we are a very target-driven business.

“One thing I have learned since getting here is once we set our sights on something we will go and get it. So we will be top three in JD Power in the next couple of years.”

Toyota ranked third in the JD Power CSI in 2014, when Holden was fourth, while Ford slipped below the mass-market average in seventh.

Mazda and Hyundai have also been two of the biggest sales improvers in recent years according to VFACTS registrations numbers, sitting third and fourth on the table in 2014. This year Mazda has climbed to second behind Toyota, while Hyundai is close behind Holden in fourth.