Revving up the Customer Experience Engine
I was curious to hear more about your approach to partnerships. How important are partnerships with gas stations or parking vendors, for example?
As I mentioned earlier, customers don’t care about the complexities within GM. They also don’t care about the complexities of the brands that are really delivering the unified experience, how they’re organized, and how everyone’s getting paid throughout the value chain. We think it’s a very big opportunity for us. Obviously it’s very early days in the technology, so we’re still building some of it. We’re recruiting partners into the platform, and I can tell you that there’s a high level of enthusiasm from all of the partners that are part of what we would call the mobility chain, or the mobility experience. That can include ride-sharing and car-sharing models; increasingly your experience with General Motors may not be through a General Motors vehicle that you actually own but one that you may be ride-sharing or using on a temporary basis.
What are some trends you’re seeing in the automotive industry, aside from the obvious ones like self-driving cars? How are those impacting what you’re doing?
Specifically within customer experience, or CRM, customers are flocking to mobile at a pace that is exceeding our expectations. Fortunately we’ve made very good investments. When it comes to the adoption of mobile as a primary mode or channel for customers to be able to consume content from us—whether that’s for sales, marketing, service, or just interacting with their vehicles—the appetite for that capability is very high.
We had about 200 million interactions through the mobile phone in 2016. That number is almost double what it was the year before that, which was double the year before that. The growth trajectory is huge. Think about the power of those interactions: That’s 200 million times customers pulled out their phones, authenticated into an experience, and then did something without us having to pay anything for that impression. We weren’t spending search-engine money to drive you to some website or running advertising to drive you. We had your attention in front of an experience that we could manage and personalize 200 million times. We don’t even know what the value of that is, but we know it’s significant. We’re going to continue to double-down on being where our customers expect us to be, which is increasingly in the palm of their hands.
Looking farther down the line, are there any other changes or trends that you are preparing for?
You already mentioned autonomous vehicles. Then there’s ride sharing, car sharing. Think Uber and Lyft. Those are all very, very disruptive technologies and platforms. We’re early days, and there are still questions about the viability of those business models over time. But clearly there is a high level of appetite among customers. So we’re looking at that very seriously and figuring out where, in that value chain, GM should play.
We’ve made strategic investments. We’ve made a $500 million investment in Lyft. We started a car-sharing/ride-sharing company called Maven as a separate brand. We are very actively not just looking at it, [but] actively investing and learning as we go. And those models will evolve quickly as we learn what works and what doesn’t.
Are there any lessons you’d like to share that can be applied more broadly, outside of your industry?
Eat the elephant one bite at a time. Large organizations like General Motors take a long time to transform, but we know we have to move quickly. Being very thoughtful and strategic around what part of the customer experience you’re going to fix first is really important, and be as precise as you can with the scope and nail it. Do it really, really well, and that will earn the organization’s confidence in your ability to do it at the next level of scale. Over time, you will transform the customer journey without having a project that becomes so big, so complex, that it doesn’t become executable.
Associate Editor Oren Smilansky can be reached at osmilansky@infotoday.com.