Andrew Ashman, Global Consumer Experience Manager for Ford Motor Company, told Loyalty 360 that his company’s main goal is to attain true loyalty and advocacy for the Ford and Lincoln brand and its retailers.
Ashman said the company’s Consumer Experience Movement – designed to transform the dealer-customer relationship into a world-class experience – has been the driving force behind Ford’s keen focus on meaningful customer engagement.
“Once we identified that we needed to focus on engagement, we had to understand how to measure it,” Ashman explained. “Since engagement is about the emotional connection with the customer, we needed to be emotive with our questions.”
With support from its retailers, Ashman said Ford started to ask customers if they “love” their dealer.
“We’ve learned that 72% of customers will say they love their dealer, which is extremely high based on how strong a feel of love really is,” he said. “While only 56% of satisfied customers are actually loyal, we find that 88% of all engaged customers are loyal. Moving to engagement provides two opportunities: We are able to celebrate the great relationships that our retailers create every day and we can use those as bright spots to help our retailers create that energy more often.”
Ashman said Ford’s considerable research has shown that engagement requires an emotional connection and it is the dealership employees who have to build these relationships.
“To create engaged customers, we must have engaged employees,” Ashman explained. “We have learned that through our benchmarking of great consumer focused companies such as Apple, Starbucks and Ritz Carlton, but have also learned it from our best retailers. “
The Consumer Experience Movement launched in 2011. Together with a team of retailers from across the country, Ford developed an initiative that goes well beyond any company program launched to date.
“Instead of telling our retailers how to run their business, which is the basis of many other OEM programs, we focus on bringing new insights from employees and customers to the table and then leverage a coach to help them build an engagement plan that works for them,” Ashman said. “We can do all the process training we want, but we’re never going to be able to deliver an engaged customer without engaged employees.”
Dealers who sign up to participate in the CEM are assigned a professional coach who gets them started on the road to self-discovery with a Team Member Engagement Survey designed to elicit honest impressions from both management and staff about the quality of the work environment. Once the survey is complete, the coach meets with managers to go over the information and develop a plan of action.
The coaches also gather information through Mystery Shop Reports, which are aimed at evaluating the relationship between store employees and customers, and Customer Viewpoint Reports -- which capture feedback from all customer sales and service encounters at the dealership.
The process is designed to provide dealers with comprehensive and valuable insight into their leadership, culture, and employee engagement.
“We employ coaches, which is a much different approach,” Ashman explained. “Their role is to help get the best out of the leadership of each dealership. They do not have a process manual of what they need to do. They have tools and resources to help the Leadership team better engage their people. It is about creating a positive environment that will create true employee engagement. It blows away people that Ford would invest in them and that this is an approach that would really work.”
Ashman said if there is a culture of negativity, it’s easy for everyone to be negative.
“We found 40% of all dealership employees didn’t trust each other,” he said. “Now we’re getting that figure down to 15%-20%. We want to get everyone involved in this positive movement.”