How important is CX in the automotive industry?

It’s no secret that customer experience or CX for short, is a vital part of any business. Especially those in highly competitive markets such as the automotive industry but just how important is it?

Before diving into the data that shows how much a of an impact CX has on automotive businesses sales, as well as exiting new tools to drastically improve your CX, lets first set the context correctly. What aspects of your business contribute to the level of CX you deliver? What does good CX look like? And arguably most importantly what does bad CX look like?

What contributes to CX both good and bad?

• Trust -this seems obvious but is a little bit more complex, you won’t be surprised to read that your product/service not delivering on its promise leads to bad CX, but even if the customer is just expecting it to fall short this leads to poor CX despite the ending result. No one wants the uncomfortable feeling of handing over money for something they’re not confident in!
• Customer support & responsiveness - Customer support, responsiveness, and Customer service—How hard is it for the customer to reach you? When they get through are they on hold for 40 minutes? This is arguably the biggest contributor to CX, people don’t like waiting
• Onboarding & first impressions -when the customer first meets with your employees do they feel welcome and comfortable? Do they get the impression your staff don’t care/ don’t know what they are talking about? Is initial setup/purchase cumbersome? If you said no to the first one and yes to the other two, the tools mentioned later are a must have.
• After sale service quality - post purchase is just as important as pre purchase. If there’s an issue your customer should have it resolved and quick! If your customer finds out after purchase they could have got the same thing faster, cheaper or of a high quality elsewhere I can guarantee they won’t come back.

How much of an impact does this have

A study from to Bain & Company as-well as multiple other CX research groups, found that companies that lead in customer experience outperform their competitors by approximately 80%, yeah prioritising one aspect of your business can have that much of an impact. On top of this a case study from mcorpcx.com found that automotive firms seen a 30-40% increase in revenue after prioritising CX! How much does bad CX impact a firm? We live in a world where73% of customers won't forgive a single mistake so its easy to say it has quite a large impact!

How can you improve your CX

You could go down the traditional route of hiring better trained staff, using "secret shoppers" to test current staff and been obnoxiously nice to everyone that comes through your door to the point its realistically doing more harm than good.

Or you could except the fact it's not humanly possible to ensure every one of your customers gets the experience you want them to have and turn to Customer service automation and AI and ML in the automotive industry solutions—specifically AI employees for Automotive businesses.

Automotive AI employees may possibly be the greatest blessing the automotive industry has ever seen, not including Henry Ford of course. AI employees for customer support don't leave urgent customer support queries waiting, they never seem uninterested/unknowledgeable about a customer's request and most importantly they aren't human they don't make human mistakes like forgetting a small detail that seems unimportant despite the fact the whole sales riding on it, they will never be rude to customer because they had a rough day and best of all they don't have workers rights!! And cost a faction of the cost of hiring humans. Startups building these AI solutions, such as Relatim through Enterprise Ireland's New Frontiers Program, are accelerating innovation in automotive customer experience.