How Volkswagen used experience data to improve online sales

In an interview with Brigid Archibald, managing director of Asia-Pacific and Japan at Qualtrics, Jason Bradshaw, former chief customer and marketing officer for Volkswagen Group Australia, shared how building a robust experience management platform led him to success in his six-year tenure at the company.

Bradshaw offered a deep-dive into the steps he took to transform customer, employee and brand experience at Volkswagen by putting the voice of customer (VOC) and employee experience initiatives front and center. In doing so, Bradshaw has achieved significant results, such as a dramatic overnight increase of online sales and tackling some of the brand’s most long-standing problems.

• Becoming customer-centric

  Bradshaw joined Volkswagen six years ago as its first ever chief customer officer and made the decision to restructure the organization and focus energy on becoming customer-centric. The organization stored more than a decade of data showing that Volkswagen was resonating with customers from a product point of view, but had some way to go with regard to experience.

  “I walked into a robust VOC program that was collecting dust,” admitted Bradshaw. “We changed this by moving to Qualtrics, going from a slow system that took months to provide data, to real-time information that every one of our team members has constant access to.”

• Focus on employee experience

  Volkswagen brought customer and employee data together to identify points of friction within existing employee and customer experiences. Analysis revealed that it was Volkswagen’s employees who were ‘winning or losing the day’.

  “If our employees were telling us that they weren’t brand advocates, we knew those dealerships would have a customer problem. And equally, if we had employee data that told us the majority of employees within a dealership were passionate brand advocates, their customer metrics would be improving,” Bradshaw explained. “As soon as we implemented this we could see very quickly the link between employee and customer experience.”

• Expanding to brand and product experience

  Volkswagen did not stop at integrating employee experience enhancements into workflows, improvements were extended to both brand and product experience also. By leveraging the four main pillars of the Qualtrics experience management operating system (XMOS), Bradshaw could enable the business to make strategic decisions informed by real-time brand, product, employee and customer data, allowing Volkswagen to move quicker, and more nimbly than competitors.

  “This is why when we relaunched Volkswagen service plans, known as Volkswagen care plans, based on the data from our product experience research; we were able to dramatically increase our sales, literally overnight.”

• Making the business case for experience management ROI

  Bradshaw explained the biggest advantage when making business cases was the fact that data was delivered in real-time. With the data collected on the Qualtrics platform, Volkswagen was able to determine that 30 percent of customers were happy to buy a vehicle online and once they launched ecommerce access to one of their models, it sold out within 12 hours.

  “In March of 2020 were forecasting no vehicle sales for three to four months as a best case scenario. We set the team to research and within days had enough data to show that customers were willing to buy online,” noted Bradshaw. “Most did not even want to do a test drive and this drove the implementation of our ecommerce platform. We combined brand experience data about what customers wanted during the pandemic and CX data from online sales to continue to improve the solution.”

To hear more about how experience management can transform your approach to customer, employee, brand and product data, register for Qualtrics XM: Work Different 2021