After a year in which profitability recovered across its U.S. dealer network, Audi will ask its dealers to refocus on the customer experience this year in an effort to differentiate the premium German brand from competitors.
Speaking with Automotive News this week, Daniel Weissland, president of Audi of America, said that the expansion of the brand’s electric portfolio — it launched the E-tron GT on Tuesday — provides an opportunity for dealers to better connect with customers. Audi and its dealers held a virtual make meeting the week prior to the 2021 NADA Show.
“What we can influence — and it’s definitely one of our focus points — we want to obviously increase our customer experience,” Weissland said. “We have the best and most electrified product portfolio in 2021 that we’ve ever had, with the E-tron GT coming, and later the year, the Q4 E-tron and the Q4 E-tron Sportback. We now have a full-fledged electric portfolio.”
Weissland said dealers are the linchpin in attracting and retaining retail customers. Designers, engineers and factory workers can make quality premium vehicles, but Audi needs dealers’ “commitment to remain laser-focused on meeting customer expectations. This is ultimately what matters the most.”
Weissland said there are Audi dealerships in the U.S. that already interact with customers “proactively, from the very first touch point, to tell consumers, ‘No matter what, I’ll take care of it. No matter what, I’ll do that.’ And I think for me, that is the right approach.”
Weissland said some dealerships will respond to customer needs only when asked, but “from a premium point of view, the customer shouldn’t even have to ask for it; you should not just only meet the customer expectation from the first touch point, you should exceed it. If you delight or surprise your customer by offering certain things maybe the customer doesn’t even expect. That’s for certain things that we’re working on.”
Weissland and Don Flow, Audi dealer council chairman, said that the brand and dealers worked closely together a year ago to weather the tumultuous beginnings of the COVID-19 pandemic. Flow credited Audi for being one of the first brands to step in to shore up struggling dealers with guaranteed incentive payments and an overall simplification of the brand’s factory-dealer relationship when the crisis struck the U.S. Weissland said the crisis pushed dealers to do and try things that they might not otherwise have done, and it’s made dealers better.
“In life, certain things need to happen to change our behavior, because human beings like to sit in our comfort zone, and COVID forced us all outside of our comfort zone,” Weissland said. “Independent from COVID, I think our industry is changing so much, customer expectations are changing so much, behavior is changing so much, that if we’re not willing to step outside of our comfort zone, there’s a risk that we are left behind.”
