Learn the Lesson of BMW’s Customer Journey

I bought a second-hand car recently, and I had it in mind for quite some time beforehand to buy a BMW. I really like BMs. They’re fast, engineered with precision, always reliable, offer fabulous choice in features, and they have a touch-of-class. But the BMW dealership I bought it from and the services I have since used produced a really disappointing experience. Great product, rubbish service.

A tier-two premium brand like BMW evokes expectations of all the things I mention about the product, but I also expect the same high qualities of the BMW services they offer. We know that the drivers of loyalty are not solely dominated by the product experience (NPS data shows this) but also include service experiences which people receive at various touch-points along their customer journey. Let me briefly describe my recent customer journey experience so that you can see how my expectations deteriorated dramatically during only the first 3 months of owning my new car, and why I am now in no haste to continue using BMW services.

First, the central locking system malfunction led to my keys being locked in the car in the middle of the English countryside miles away from anywhere. Instead of sending me the ‘BMW emergency services’ as promised in the brochure, along trundled a local van with a couple of lads who used to break into and steal cars. Now they get paid for doing it legally. However, they couldn’t get into my car without causing damage as they didn’t have the right equipment, and so I ended up staying in a hotel for the night which I had to pay for. This was not the service I was expecting from BMW. BMW did come the next day with the right equipment, by which time my weekend was ruined. Second, shortly after buying the car I noticed a faint noise coming from the wheel. I took the car in for a check-up. It turned out I needed new brake-disks and brake-shoes. I naturally thought this would be covered by the one-year warranty as clearly two months ownership doing low mileage would not have been the cause of any damage. Alas not and the repair cost me £300 ($510). They did discount the cost by 10% - huh, small recompense I thought, remembering how the BMW dealership salesman boasted of the £2,000 ($3,400) worth of servicing it had had. Third, on close inspection of the chassis, I noticed a couple of dents, though quite small, that had not been re-moulded but instead had had paint (not quite in the correct colour) dabbed on them to cover up the damage. Did the BMW salesman really not notice this? I’m now thinking maybe he did the paint-job himself?! I don’t know, but by now I was left with a feeling of having been cheated.

What a disappointing experience and all in the name of BMW. Now I know dealerships and service points are BMW franchises, but they still operate under the BMW brand and I associate my experience with that brand. Admittedly it can be difficult for brand-owners to ensure the franchise experience is delivered as desired or to provide a great experience; third party objectives don’t always strictly align with the brand-owner’s. But there are ways to harness the complexities of connecting franchises and the right brand experience: Both owner and franchise must have collaborative systems and processes aimed at understanding and responding to the critical service experiences along the customer journey. Car manufacturers and franchises do work together and share customer research data for example in order to maximize sales and aim to give the best experience. In my case, the system and process wasn’t operating effectively.

It is important to know what the customer is thinking and doing at each stage of the customer journey, and to have this from a sequential perspective. You need to know this so that you can track the root-cause of falling or rising expectations in time and along a process. Take a sales process or a ‘buying journey’ like the one I had followed by the first 3 months of ownership. I was turned into a detractor of their services through three incidents which happened at three points in time at three major touch-points, and where my expectations were set before and during sale. But the managers of third party franchise service level agreements don’t know about my ‘total’ journey experience, and I daresay the franchise managers don’t either. What hope is there to deliver a great experience if they cannot connect all the dots and respond?

Organisations have different departments – sales, technical enquiries, general services, retail etc., and they all need to work together to provide the desired customer experience, and hopefully the one which will get customers to spread positive word of mouth. Mechanisms required to getting all departments working cross-functionally are in the form of different media channels - IVR, email, web, phone being the major ones – and in experience capture strategies, such as asking the right questions at the right time to the right customer. You also need a system to manage the data and provide actionable data which tells the whole customer story. It might appear to be a complex piece of design work that is required to build this whole mechanism, but the approach is far simpler than building multi-channel and potentially inconsistent measurement strategies. How can an organization understand the true value of loyalty of the customer relationship from such an approach? Some companies are adopting the customer journey approach and devising their whole product and service improvement strategies around it with great success. Virgin Media are a successful case in point.

May I suggest a step-by-step approach to building the customer journey into your Net Promoter or Customer Loyalty programme?

1. Adopt a bottom-up strategy in your organisation to measure and monitor the customer experience at critical touch-points
2. Construct the typical customer journeys using existing data-points and internal / external interviews
3. Map out the journeys indicating points of physical and brand contact over time, inbound and outbound
4. Identify the correct surveying media and methods which capture experiences in between key contact points and enable you to track the progress of falling or rising expectations as a customer moves through a journey
5. Link the surveyed data gathered at contact or ‘transactional’ points to build a picture of the entire customer relationship in order to prioritise action and improvement, and understand the impact it has on Net Promoter at the relationship level in order to make strategic change

In this time of economic uncertainty, especially as we witness prospective consolidation in the car industry, I would suggest that those car manufacturers who win the battle in the dealerships and service points will be the ones who manage to establish a distinct loyalty and therefore competitive advantage over their rivals.

Comments

[Mark Gregory]

James you've posted relevant and well thought through points. Unfortunately from my extensive experience of working in the sector you describe most manufacturers (including the German ones) are more focussed on bad profits at dealer level. The dealers are driven by bonuses, the manufacturer ultimately is geared up to shift its product and until there's a fundamental acceptance of good profits all the way through the distribution chain from the manufacturer to the dealers and the dealer groups they belong to, nothing much will change. The manufacturer Brand Academies for training dealer staff are little more than window dressing. They have a long way to go before they join the dots up.

Mark