Volkswagen Group Sweden revamps the customer experience with Salesforce

Today, changing customer expectations are causing companies across every industry to adjust the way they do business. While the automotive industry has traditionally placed the emphasis of its marketing and sales efforts on the vehicles themselves, various groups have noticed a shift among consumers as the experience of buying a car has become as important as the product they are looking to purchase. When the Volkswagen Group saw this trend, the global car manufacturer decided to place substantial emphasis on delivering a strong digital customer journey.

The business’ Swedish wing supported this initiative by launching a transformation of the experience it provided to shoppers and users alike. Previously, multiple systems had played a role in Volkswagen Group Sweden’s sales and customer outreach processes, which had also been overly reliant on manual work. Through this initiative, the organization envisioned a new system in which its representatives benefited from a new set of tools and automation that created a 360-degree view of their customers and enabled them to deliver a more personalized journey. To ensure the project’s successful completion, Volkswagen Group Sweden decided to engage with Capgemini as its transformation partner.

Simplifying CRM

Together, the organizations began the project by reviewing the automotive company’s existing systems and processes while comparing them to the Rocky template. This enabled the partners to develop a mutual understanding of the challenges they would face in pursuing the transformation as well as the key objectives the project would need to fulfill.

Following this review, Volkswagen Group Sweden and Capgemini settled upon the Salesforce CRM platform as the best fit solution. This would deliver the desired levels of automation while merging customer relationship management (CRM) systems. Once the partners had a transformation blueprint in place, they implemented a collection of Salesforce and MuleSoft technology to make their vision into a reality.

The Salesforce Sales Cloud expanded the company’s ability to attract new customers by capturing, qualifying, and routing the enquiries of potential consumers while expanding reporting capabilities. Meanwhile, the Salesforce Marketing Cloud provided campaign managers with new tools to develop and release more targeted marketing content, including both manual and automated outreach. In addition, the solution expanded Volkswagen Group Sweden’s ability to track campaign performance to provide greater clarity into what customers engaged with and what did not appeal to them.  As the third element to the platform, the Salesforce Service Cloud delivered end-to-end request and complaint management processes to ensure that when customers reached out, they quickly received satisfying responses.

Personalizing the customer journey

In combination with MuleSoft, these Salesforce solutions built a new CRM approach that provided potential and returning customers with a more tailored experience. Volkswagen Group Sweden representatives could more easily understand the interests and expectations of the consumers they reached out to, ensuring that engagements led to a more enjoyable and productive engagement for both parties. In addition, the platform offered multiple channels for these interactions, ensuring greater flexibility with the foundation for a true omnichannel experience.

With a localized CRM solution rolled out, Volkswagen Group Sweden had the collaborative and consumer-centric system it envisioned. The Salesforce platform offered sustainable growth and could be scaled accordingly to support the company’s future ambitions. Personalized digital experiences fulfilled customer expectations and offered the flexibility to adapt on a case-by-case basis. And by providing employees with new tools and strategic automation, Volkswagen Group Sweden made it easier to adapt its CRM approach based on real-time customer data while simplifying reporting and dashboards, all of which contributed to a better employee experience.

Following the success of this project, Volkswagen Group Sweden and the global company will continue to explore innovative opportunities to deliver a superior customer experience based on digital technology and omnichannel engagement.