Goal for GM’s Boler-Davis: The Best Overall Customer Experience in the Industry

General Motors has endured an arduous journey in recent years, stemming from questionable vehicle quality, to market share declines, to financial losses and finally a 2009 bankruptcy and federal bailout.

But General Motors emerged from that onerous period with renewed vigor, an absolute laser focus on the customer, enthusiastic senior leadership guiding that journey, and a fervent hope that it can reach that mountaintop again in the automobile industry.

One of those enthusiastic leaders at GM is Alicia Boler-Davis, General Motors Senior Vice President of Global Quality and Customer Experience. During her speech in October at the Motor Press Guild in Los Angeles, Bolder-Davis was succinct in her mission: “Our goal at GM is to provide the best overall customer experience in the industry,” she said.

Boler-Davis pointed to 14 consecutive profitable quarters and “our keen new focus on improving the GM customer experience and product quality.”

“When we look across the auto industry, we see that no one company stands out as the clear winner in the customer experience area,” Boler-Davis said. “Some companies do it better than others, but even the best in the business can’t compare to the outstanding reputation that companies like Apple or FedEx enjoy in satisfying customers today. At GM, we see this as real opportunity not just to improve customer service, but to take the overall customer experience to a whole new level. We want to create true customer advocates – customers who not only repurchase our brands and products, but who also go out of their way to recommend them to others.”

To do this, she said GM is “completely reinventing” its approach and transforming the entire company.

“We’re making the customer front and center in everything we do … from how we interact with them to how we design, engineer, and manufacture our vehicles,” she said. “Fundamentally, it’s about changing behaviors. It’s about making GM a customer-centric company … and working to ensure that everything we do is driven by the customer.”

About 17 months ago, Boler-Davis said, GM linked the customer experience and product quality areas – and she is the first person at GM to run both organizations globally.

“GM is the first automaker to combine these two functions under one leader, and we believe it gives us a real competitive advantage,” she explained. “The Customer Experience side of my job is mainly about how we interact with our customers.”

Boler-Davis cited two key areas:

Our customers’ perception of our vehicles, brands, and image before they step into the dealer showroom.

And the relationships our customers have with GM and Dealership personnel throughout the sales, service and ownership experience.

The Product Quality side of my job is equally important to the creation of life-long customers. She pointed to three main areas:

Product excellence – which includes the overall design, the driving experience, and Human Vehicle Integration or HVI. Basically, all the things that attract you to a vehicle in the first place.

Initial quality

And finally, long-term reliability and durability.

“Our focus is to ensure that every touch point the customer has with GM, including our products, is exceptional,” she said. “Our goal is to build a relationship that drives retention. Consider that a single percentage point improvement in sales retention equates to about 25,000 U.S. car and truck sales at GM … or about $700 million in annual revenue. That’s a big incentive and that’s one reason we’re so intently focused on this effort. We are determined to make GM a leader in all these areas… so let’s get into some details about what we’re doing, starting with the Customer Experience side of my job.”

Boler-Davis said GM is in the middle of the most significant dealer renovation project in company history.

“Our dealer partners are making great progress having either completed renovation or getting ready for construction,” she explained. “Beyond that, nearly all of our dealers have gone through customer service training.”

More than 2,500 Chevrolet dealerships have completed three-day customer-focused seminars at the highly regarded Disney Institute. Similarly, Cadillac dealers have participated in a customer service initiative with Ritz-Carlton and Buick-GMC dealers have focused on executing the Buick Experience. Cadillac and Buick-GMC will participate in the Disney Institute as well.

“All dealerships are focused on standards that deliver to our customer’s expectations,” she said. “In fact, we’re training our field teams to work collaboratively with our dealers to help them execute to those standards.”

One area where GM is making a big push is in-vehicle technology and infotainment – which continues to be a hot button for customers across the industry.

“As vehicles become increasing complex, the winning automakers will be those that make complexity transparent to the customer,” Boler-Davis explained. “It’s not just in the design and execution of the technology – it’s also a matter of how well that technology is explained and introduced to the customer. So, we’re working to streamline the hardware and software for the user, but we’re also training our dealership personnel and our GM field employees to assure our customers have a great experience from the start.”

GM has more than 50 in-vehicle technology experts – referred to as Connected Customer Specialists -- in the field, allowing for 85% coverage of its U.S. markets.

These specialists work with customers and dealership staff to quickly address customer questions about vehicle connectivity and infotainment systems. They also work with the Certified Technology Experts that are at every GM dealership nationwide.

“We believe it is important to have at least one person at every dealership fully knowledgeable and responsible for helping customers with all their infotainment needs,” Boler-Davis said.

Another aspect of Vehicle Excellence is drive quality, Boler-Davis explained.

“Drive quality is simply a measure of how the driver experiences the performance, feel, and feedback characteristics of the vehicle – things like the responsiveness of the accelerator pedal, shift smoothness, and so on,” she said.

“Until recently, drive quality assessment has been highly subjective … and developing a scientific quantification of drive quality has been extremely difficult,” Boler-Davis said. “But we’re now using a fairly new measuring tool that we purchased from an Austrian company called AVL. This tool provides us with a numerical assessment of drive quality – and enables us to precisely benchmark the competition.”

Essentially, she said the AVL tool allows GM to take the customer’s requirements and translate them into technical specifications that engineers use to deliver the driving experience that customers expect.

“It’s amazingly helpful, and it has now been fully integrated into the development process for all our vehicles,” she said. “While we’re not the only manufacturer to use the AVL tool, we understand that we’re using it more extensively than anyone else, given our global footprint and diverse propulsion strategies. It puts us on the forefront of defining a deeper understanding of how to use the tool to our competitive advantage.”

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