Customer experience: a key factor in the car transport industry

Which purchasing factors are the most relevant when consumers start consider the next car they are going to buy? This was the question a group of LUISS students asked themselves in our recent cooperation with the famous Italian university. The challenge was to discover the main indicators of customer experience in the automotive sector. The tools to do that, of course, were the data and technologies of our suite.

A task, I need to say, they brilliantly handled.

First of all, let’s start with a bit of background. In KPI6, we are always eager to meet new talents, to collaborate with important institutions, and to launch innovative challenges.

So, we have recently started a collaboration with the LUISS Guido Carli University, and specifically with the Marketing & Business Analytics course of the Bachelor’s Degree in “Management and Computer Science”, held by prof. Francisco Villarroel Ordenes.

The challenge tested our young analysts, forcing them to solve problems they are likely going to face face in their first job experiences.

The goal here was to solve a problem for the hypothetical company management, using the data offered by KPI6 on the market, on the players, and above all on consumers.

The challenges involved many industries, from automotive to technology, passing through retail and entertainment.

Let’s have a look at our first team’s output!

Students:

The goal of the automotive sector challenge was to discover the main key factors for buying a car, observing the difference in perception between major brands and even to discover the effect of online humor on brand reputation.

The result was a brilliant, insightful analysis, in which the students pulled out tons of interesting data from the KPI6 suite.

During the last years, the car transport industry has been changing relevantly, especially since the introduction of innovative services that allowed cars to be connected to the internet, opening an entire scenario of tech possibilities for cars.

Moreover, artificial intelligence has started to play a role in the aforesaid industry thanks to the loads of data collected that are used to build algorithms that assist the driver and monitor the specifics of the vehicle. Nonetheless, the most striking services offered regard personalization (both of the vehicle and of the insurance and warranty plans) and maintenance, since it is optimized by artificial intelligence and by customized services that aim to allow the customer to save time (e.g. pick-up and delivery service, which basically consist in scheduled maintenance performed entirely by the car dealer without the need to even take the car to the repair shop and back personally).

Car dealers are in fact starting to focus more on the personalized services to offer to their customers and of course on how to advertise them properly, since they have the compelling need to build brand loyalty in their customers and to attract new customers without focusing on the product per se. Given the rise in popularity of services that offer vehicles for hire (e.g UBER), leasing and long-term car rentals, buying a car has become progressively less appealing for customers.

Moreover, the prices of the aforesaid services are absolutely competitive and the costs that those companies face are clearly not even comparable with the ones faced by car dealers. Then, car dealers are extremely threatened by those types of services since they obviously cannot compete, as said before, on pricing but also on the product per se, since any car model is available to both car rentals and to companies that offer vehicles for hire. 

In order to fight that fierce competition, car dealers started to focus more on what they could offer after the purchase of the car, with particular attention to the enhancement and improvement of customer experience. In fact, the services mentioned in the first section are of course also a strategy to outplay from the market the services that threaten car dealers and they are also used in advertising to display to the public the particular attention that car dealers pay to their customers.

The main aims of this study are two: the first is to prove that customers particularly appreciate the current customer experiences that they have after the purchase of a car thanks to the innovative services, while the second is to point out how customers are now shifted towards the social status that car dealers provide them not only with the car itself but especially with the particular regard that the customers have with the dedicated and exclusive services. 

With our queries, we performed sentiment analyses on blogs and Twitter with respect to the services offered by three premium German brands: Audi, BMW and Mercedes-Benz.

The reasons behind the choice are that those companies rely much on the services mentioned before and also because they are comparable since they are in the same market. 

The analysis confirmed our hypotheses, yielding positive results regarding the expected sentiment of these services and it can be said that those companies nowadays are really focusing on the customer experience as a whole. 

Moreover, the comparison between the three companies taken into consideration has highlighted some differences in the views of the companies by the customers with respect to the focus on the services offered and advertised the most. 

In fact:

In conclusion, post-sale services play a dominant role in the considered market since not only they improve the customer experience consistently, but also they can be heavily advertised to enhance brand reputation and characterization.