GM has a strong history of offering superior products and services. That trend continues to hold true. In fact, every GM brand recently ranked among the top 10 according to a 2015 J.D. Power Vehicle Dependability Study that tracked 2012 vehicles in their third year of service. Buick was also honored in the 2015 Consumer Reports’ Car Brand Report Cards. It ranked seventh on a list that was once exclusively dominated by Japanese cars.
However, simply hitting that mark of quality is no longer a guaranteed driver of brand loyalty. New market forces, emerging technologies, and changing customer expectations have changed everything.
David Mingle, Executive Director for Global Connected Customer Experience for General Motors, recently spoke to Loyalty360 to illuminate the innovative strategies the automaker is implementing to engage consumers on multiple levels.
How is GM’s relationship to customer engagement and loyalty changing?
Mingle: We have recently combined our OnStar business unit with our customer experience group together into one team, which was a recognition that technology and connectivity are quickly evolving to include a wide range of digital services. These are going to be very important to our customer’s experience going forward.
Has that changed how you measure customer engagement and loyalty with regards to these new opportunities?
Mingle: It certainly does. Traditionally, within our industry we would think in terms of customer lifecycles, or an ownership cycle, which would be typically four, five, or six years. Today, in terms of service loyalty or service retention, those are now maybe 90 to 120 day cycles. But with all the technology, especially the 4G technology, you now have in most of our 2015 model cars, there are opportunities to shrink that dramatically. With regards to monthly subscription services that we sell, there are weekly and even daily opportunities for engagement.
The 4G connectivity also means that we can get a lot more content back from the car than we’ve ever been able to before. So we know more about how the car is operating. We can track things like tire pressure, remaining oil life, and, through our on board vehicle diagnostics program, we can preemptively notify customers of other features that may need maintenance before they actually fail.
So the ability to collect and use driver data effectively is a big factor in your customer engagement strategy?
Mingle: Right. We of course get appropriate consent from the owner. But we can use that data to provide additional services. We have a service through OnStar called AtYourService, for example, where we can book a hotel room on a customer’s behalf. And, we can offer discounts on related services and promotions; such as a coupon for a restaurant near the hotel we just booked.
This is a way of expanding the services that the car can offer well beyond what you traditionally might consider as being part of the vehicle experience. The data is very clear. Engaged customers are loyal customers.
How do you define customer loyalty and what are some of the biggest challenges the auto industry has right now in creating loyalty?
Mingle: Loyalty is driven by a number of things. Product quality is a big deal, and the quality of our products has never been better. Price and value are also significant. The deals that are available when customers come back into the market are always important. The third is the experience itself. And we have to continue to evolve the customer experience. Our biggest challenge is learning to innovate at the speed that the best of the best are. Not just the best of automotive.
How do you make sure the dealer and the brand is aligned with the changing expectations of the customer?
Mingle: Every interaction matters. And we realize that active listening is very important. We changed our surveys to make them shorter and to provide more white space for comments, allowing customers to give us feedback on topics not covered by our survey questions. And we are able to aggregate that data across all of our dealers nationally for all 4 brands and identify opportunities to re-engage our customers. Our dealers and our call centers are all empowered to do what’s right to make the customer happy.
This isn’t just about problem resolution. If we find that one of our service techs is getting exceptional praise, for example, we reinforce that behavior and use it as a training tool for the rest of the staff. We find it very effective to motivate our staff by rewarding good behavior, not just by pointing areas we can improve.