Porsche aims to be able to reach its customers around the clock, whatever their location, and vice versa. For this purpose, the company is stepping up its activities in the area of online sales and enhancing digital offerings with a clear customer focus. Porsche wants to hold the top position in selected customer studies.
A central goal of the Porsche Strategy 2030 is to excite customers. Porsche does not just want to meet customers’ expectations but to exceed them. The customer excitement index is used to measure how enthusiastic customers are along their journey with Porsche. In the future, this should be used as a routine procedure at the relevant points on the customer journey, including digital contact points.
The Executive Board established the product quality and customer satisfaction forum many years ago. This is made up of the entire Executive Board and selected heads of specialist departments. It presents information on these two topics and makes customer-oriented decisions. All levels from retail to the Executive Board are consistently working on measures for customer satisfaction in a multistep process. In this way, Porsche can learn about market-specific topics that are highly relevant for customer satisfaction directly from retail and the dealer organizations.
Porsche wants to use the customer excitement index as a control instrument in the product quality and customer satisfaction forum from 2023. This is based on customers’ expectations and differentiates between “unsatisfied” customers, whose expectations were not met, “satisfied” customers, whose expectations were met, and “excited” customers, whose expectations were exceeded. Only those in the “excited” category are included in the indicator. In 2022, Porsche started a pilot project on this in selected focus markets. The new indicator is already being measured and monitored.
In light of the dynamic development of products and services, an international, fast customer review system for ideas and concepts is indispensable. In the Porsche Advisors Club, customers in the four markets of Germany, China, the US and the UK answer questions on an ongoing basis. In addition to traditional tools such as online surveys, Porsche also uses a range of digital communication options such as discussion forums, short surveys or online communication between Porsche employees and customers.
In 2022, Porsche added a number of new functions to its customer relationship management system (CRM), primarily aimed at strengthening the omnichannel approach. This primarily includes the further expansion of customer acquisition and retention processes in the area of online sales. Customers around the world can now find their dream vehicle in the Porsche vehicle finder for new and used cars. In many markets, they can also order direct from the dealer online. They give direct feedback on their vehicle experience on the digital marketplace. This gives Porsche an increasingly more comprehensive picture of its customers’ preferences, which it then systematically uses to enhance its digital offering.
There is a particular focus on enabling as seamless an interplay as possible between the digital customer touchpoints and the interactions in stationary retail. For instance, Porsche has modernized and integrated various online forms for customer contact in such a way that the dealer organization receives the data in the CRM system virtually in real time and can automatically update the customer data. This not only eases the burden of manual entry work, but also maps market-specific follow-up processes. For example, Porsche uses real time customer satisfaction surveys.
In addition to the vehicle finder function, Porsche also expanded the option to buy self-configured vehicles online in 2022. For this, the Porsche Car Configurator was redesigned from scratch and numerous additional functions and views were added. Customers can now preorder their dream vehicle from the dealer of their choice direct from the configurator. The purchase is then concluded in the Porsche center. Porsche is only offering the new functions in Germany for now; additional markets will follow.
The omnichannel approach also strengthens the further expansion of the customer excitement index. In 2022, Porsche added additional touchpoints to the My Porsche customer platform: for example, about experiences with charging electric vehicles or with the digital co-pilot Porsche Connect for additional smart services or feedback on product quality. Porsche now measures customer excitement along the entire customer journey.
Porsche redefined and further optimized the customer care process in 2022, so as to be able to react to urgent customer requests even quicker. In addition to the global dealer organizations, the customer interaction center (CIC) is now a centralized digital customer contact point, especially in the area of e-commerce.
