A pleasure to have today Bernd Körber with us,
he's leading product marketing and brand management for the BMW Group.
BMW for years already has been known to really drive customer experience,
think about customer needs, and kind of show innovation here.
What does customer-centricity mean today and in the future for the BMW Group?
There needs to be a consistency.
So what you experience in terms of a brand in the communication,
what you experience in the car,
what you experience as a customer in the service
needs to be consistent, and it needs to be differentiated,
and it needs to be in a specific BMW way.
OEMs, not only BMW, but OEMs at scale, have invested tons of money,
time, attention to revolutionize the car, to electrify the car.
We just recently did a study to prove again that for many customers
the experience of how they buy the car has not yet changed so much.
How is it going to change for consumers,
how they feel, the purchase of car, the experience around the car?
I would say first of all, in the core of
when we made the decision that we say we move in Europe
into a driving model for MINI and later on for BMW
is that we say we would like to provide a better customer experience.
That was the main driver, because in essence what we would like
to establish is a direct relationship with the customer and then driving
from there the necessary information and data to provide a better service.
We have something, for example, Proactive Care,
when it comes to service aftersales,
where you say also during life cycle you have a continuous relationship
with the customer. You have the possibility of cars
to be what we call always fresh, and then you have a consistency
when it comes to customer experience on a totally different level.
Staying close to consumers, staying close to dynamics in the market
requires a lot of information
and obviously big data, advanced analytics, AI
is the technology to kind of process all this information
and make sense out of that.
First of all, I would say to leverage AI
you have to have an organization that is global,
you have to have an organization that has an antennas when it comes
to product management. For example, what do customers want in China?
What do customers want in the US, etc.?
So you can have all AI capabilities in the world,
you can have a consistent platform, you can have the tools on top,
if you're not set up as an organization to have a good outside-in, where you have
good people who also leverage and use AI in the market
in our regions, sales regions to bring that to the decision making
when it comes to products, comes to communication, it's of no value.
Let's take all these puzzle pieces together.
It feels like the way consumers will experience
automotive sales in 2024 and beyond will change.
Maybe Gen AI, AI, maybe the way of go-to-market, direct-to-consumer models,
or just the focus of customer-centricity of OEMs
as a counterbalance to electrifying the car will totally kind of change
the priorities here.
We are looking forward to discuss with you and to experience this change together.