Descripció del projecte
This research doctoral project aims at identifying the needs and preferences of current and potential customers in order to optimize the experience and delivery of products and services offering from SEAT by analysing the information gathered through both online and offline customer interactions.
The Context
With the digital era advent, on-line customer interactions become a business key factor for any company. Examples of such interactions are new products announcements on the web, personalised marketing, recommender systems, social networks communications, or selling online through e-commerce platforms. All those elements are nowadays fundamentals pieces of any competitive company in any sector. However, the big impact of those online interactions does not come from the direct results of such interactions but from the possibility to better understand the customer. This new knowledge on customers are key to several aspects of businesses from product design, sales funnelling optimization, and innovation. Analysing the implicit and explicit information derived from those multiple online interactions, companies are able to better know about their (potential) customers, who they are, and more importantly what are their needs and preferences. This customer acquisition knowledge is done in an aggregated and anonymised manner by respecting individual people privacy.
In our case of study, generally customers get to the car dealership all the information collected from their online interactions is lost and not used in this key step in the sales funnelling process. In such scenario, salespeople at the car dealership start the relationship with the (potential) customer from scratch without any prior context. Typically, the good sales professional will start gathering information from the customer in an implicit way with the human interaction through conversations on the relevant topics for the sale. We are not suggesting that the feedback from online interactions could replace the natural and human interaction with the salesperson and the customer, but it could certainly be a very important and relevant complement. The collected information from digital interaction of the potential customer is rarely known by the salespeople at the car dealership. This lack of prior knowledge on the customer at the point of sales results in an extra sales effort and it can even lead to the situation in which the sale is lost. For example, we could know that a potential customer from Barcelona has configured a car with some specific equipment, but this digital configuration is not transferred to the dealership around Barcelona, and therefore that customer interest is not exploited in the best possible way. Nowadays, there is no bridge from the collected data on customers from their digital interactions to the dealership professionals. This lack of the digital knowledge on customers at the direct sales point is a challenge that could be solved and therefore dramatically improve the overall sales process.
The main goal of this project is to research on the different ways of delivering information collected through online (potential) customer interactions to the different SEAT departments and car dealerships in an orchestrated and coordinated way so that sales can be optimised, and customer satisfaction maximised. Another important aspect is the usage of such new customer knowledge to design and plan for new products and post-sales and mobility services. In summary, the goal is to get 360 degrees view on SEAT customers and potential customers to optimise business activities and anticipate new business opportunities.
