Ford Motor Company Targets Customer Loyalty and Advocacy: A Loyalty 360 Interview with Andrew Ashman

Andrew Ashman, Global Consumer Experience Manager for Ford Motor Company, told Loyalty 360 that his company conducted a plethora of research to determine the best way to move from satisfying customers and into the space of loyalty. The goal is to attain true loyalty and advocacy for the Ford and Lincoln brand and its retailers.

Ashman said the company’s Consumer Experience Movement – designed to transform the dealer-customer relationship into a world-class experience – has been the driving force behind Ford’s keen focus on meaningful customer engagement.

Ashman participated in an intriguing interview with Loyalty 360 CEO & CMO Mark Johnson.

Terms of Engagement

Ashman: We define engagement as respect, trust, control, and relationship. These are our four principles of engagement. Our research showed that what customers really want can be broken down into these four key principles: 

  1. Respect – For me as a person and respect of my time.
  2. Trust – I want to trust the people I work with.
  3. Control – Transparency in the proceedings and control of the experience.
  4. Relationship – Building a meaningful 1-to-1 relationship with our customers.

Satisfaction is a Short-Term Metric

Ashman: When we look at satisfaction, only 54% of customers who said they were satisfied were actually loyal. We have learned that we need to have customers completely satisfied and highly engaged. As an industry, we always focused on process, process, process. While the process is very important, what is more important is how we execute the process.

Do You Love Your Dealer?

Ashman: Once we identified that we needed to focus on engagement, we had to understand how to measure it. Since engagement is about the emotional connection with the customer, we needed to be emotive with our questions.  With support from our retailers, we have begun to ask customers if they “love” their dealer. We’ve learned that 72% of customers will say they love their dealer, which is extremely high based on how strong a feel of love really is. While only 56% of satisfied customers are actually loyal, we find that 88% of all engaged customers are loyal. Moving to engagement provides two opportunities: We are able to celebrate the great relationships that our retailers create every day and we can use those as bright spots to help our retailers create that energy more often. 

Creating Engaged Customers is a Result of One Key Thing

Ashman: Our research has shown that engagement requires an emotional connection and it is the people in our stores that have to build this relationship.  To create engaged customers, we must have engaged employees. We have learned that through our benchmarking of great consumer focused companies such as Apple, Starbucks and Ritz Carlton, but have also learned it from our best retailers.

The Consumer Experience Movement

Ashman: In 2011, we launched the Consumer Experience MovementTogether with a team of retailers from across the country, we developed an initiative that goes well beyond any program that we have launched to date. Instead of telling our retailers how to run their business, which is the basis of many other OEM programs, we focus on bringing new insights from employees and customers to the table and then leverage a coach to help them build an engagement plan that works for them.  We can do all the process training we want, but we’re never going to be able to deliver an engaged customer without engaged employees

Dealers who sign up to participate in the CEM are assigned a professional coach who gets them started on the road to self-discovery with a Team Member Engagement Survey designed to elicit honest impressions from both management and staff about the quality of the work environment. Once the survey is complete, the coach meets with managers to go over the information and develop a plan of action.

The coaches also gather information through Mystery Shop Reports, which are aimed at evaluating the relationship between store employees and customers, and Customer Viewpoint Reports -- which capture feedback from all customer sales and service encounters at the store.

The process is designed to provide dealers with comprehensive and valuable insight into their store’s leadership, culture, and employee engagement.

Coaching Employee Engagement

Ashman: We employ coaches, which is a much different approach. Their role is to help get the best out of the leadership of each store. They do not have a process manual of what they need to do to the store. They have tools and resources to help the Leadership team in the store to better engage their people. It is about creating a positive environment that will create true employee engagement. 

It blows away people that Ford would invest in them and that this is an approach that would really work.

We find when there is a culture of negativity, it’s easy for everyone to be negative. We found 40% of all dealership employees didn’t trust each other. Now we’re getting that figure down to 15%-20%. We want to get everyone involved in this positive movement.

How Have Things changed?

Over the past several years, we have been tracking the performance of stores in the Movement and those that are not. The results have been extremely impressive, as stores in the Movement continue to outperform those not in the Movement on all the key metrics, from customers satisfaction, engagement, loyalty, sales and profitability. 

The key difference is that these dealerships have learned to focus more on their people and the results have been amazing. The stories from the dealership owners and their people tell us that we are adding real value and the customer comments reflect it.

Loyalty Results

Ashman: As a result of the Movement and some other actions, we have seen service loyalty for us increase about four points, which is a pretty stout increase. We’ve worked hard with the retail network and have an aggressive maintenance program to ensure the Movement is sustained within our stores. It’s about understanding what drives loyalty and advocacy and how you create touch points along the continuum. What we find is at the end of the day with all things being equal, people do business with people they like. If there is a relationship between a customer and dealer, they’ll continue to buy and be loyalty advocates.

When we create true employee engagement, we will create customer engagement which will lead to having the most loyal customers and biggest advocates in the industry.

About the Author: Mark Johnson

Mark is CEO & CMO of Loyalty 360. He has significant experience in selling, designing and administering prepaid, loyalty/CRM programs, as well as data-driven marketing communication programs.

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