Overlooking the banks of the Rhine in Leverkusen, Germany, Mazda Motor Europe GmbH (MME) serves as the regional headquarters for Mazda in Europe. The company has established local suppliers and operations in over 30 countries to implement the exceptional strategies of its Japanese parent company Mazda.

The challenge: create an online experience that matches the on-site service

Mazda Motor Europe operates on the principle “One Voice to the Customer” and wanted to ensure its digital presence and customer engagement reflected the excellence of its onsite service.

The company needed to strengthen its centralised effort to capture customer feedback which is crucial not only to better understand customer needs and respond in real-time to complaints but also to amplify the large amount of positive customer feedback the company receives across different web channels.

Additionally, boasting some 1600 dealerships in its vast network, MME needed a robust platform providing an overview for top management to compare dealerships performances as well as one that offered a way to implement a unified approach to customer service.

The solution: customising a digital engagement strategy

Mazda Motor Europe selected Customer Alliance to create a digital customer feedback and engagement strategy consisting of the following:

• Creating multiple automated touchpoints for client communication
• Distributing and collecting multichannel satisfaction surveys in multiple languages
• Monitoring and managing online reviews on one platform

Gathering feedback across different touchpoints

• With Customer Alliance, Mazda was able to implement multiple feedback channels across the customer journey. This includes:

• Tablets, beacons or QR codes next to cars in the showrooms or exhibitions to collect feedback on the new facelift, new features or dealerships
• Steering traffic to online channels by providing additional information about the exhibited car model and linking to Mazda social channels, website or car configurator through QR codes
• Collect feedback on your car models at POS, trade fairs or other shows via tablet

Building Mazda’s online presence through reviews

In research collated by DEKRA, 67% of car buyers look at reviews before purchasing a vehicle, implying that managing online reviews is crucial for dealerships’ success.

To stay on top of external reviews, Mazda dealerships in Europe had the ability to manage all reviews in one place. Dealerships were notified in real time of any negative reviews below 60% to provide them with the opportunity to win back unhappy customers.

Mazda Germany also implemented Customer Alliance’s widget. This is a popup displaying the company’s average external ratings to the individual visiting the company site and includes a Call-To-Action (CTA) button allowing for internal linking.

Mazda Germany decided to use the widget’s CTA button to redirect to a link for booking a test drive and quickly saw results. Within the first 4 months of installing the widget, the dealerships of Mazda Germany had 7,410 clicks on the button within the widget which took website visitors to the link “Book a Test Drive”.

This honest display of reviews helped to build trust between the brand and its potential customers as it brought further authenticity to the brand.

Aligning dealerships across Europe

Mazda Motor Europe desired to roll out its new customer engagement strategy to ensure its European dealerships were aligned. This proved easy to do with Customer Alliance’s scalable software-as-a-service solution, which provided its powerful tools in 30 languages to cover Mazda’s European outlets.

Five large onsite workshops were held in key cities across Europe for higher management, as well as over 20 interactive webinar training to onboard dealerships to the new software.

The result: improved customer satisfaction scores

Mazda Motor Europe saw that 54% of its regional markets have shown an increase in their customer satisfaction score of sales from the previous year.

While MME still considers dealerships to be the main touchpoint for cultivating customer intimacy, it saw that dealerships could significantly enhance customer experience by getting to know customers’ preferences before they ever set foot onsite.

Equipped with these insights, dealership employees were better able to serve incoming customers in order to increase sales. Learnings were gained from the post-surveys about customer service or a Mazda product should a potential customer decide not to buy. Top management viewed this data and was able to make decisions based directly on the consumer’s voice and disseminate best practices gleaned from the shared information.

The ability to manage external reviews in one place, and to automatically create reports for quality management among the dealerships strengthened Mazda’s European network. It also allowed the company to set proper benchmarks, providing greater overall efficiency.
This led to a 79% of all regional markets of Mazda Motor Europe having shown an increase in their customer satisfaction score of service from last year (2019) and an overall 2% rise in their Net Promoter Score (NPS) from the previous year (2019).

By taking control of their online reputation and refiguring their internal approach to customer experience, Mazda Motor Europe was able to deliver tangible results to its Celebrate Driving mantra.