When I talk to people at automotive companies, they’re always interested in what Audi is doing. In part that’s because Audi is Volkswagen Group's (VW Group's) main profit driver, contributing about 40% to VW Group earnings. And in part it’s because when you talk to Audi owners — like John Vanderslice, global head of Hilton’s luxury and lifestyle brands — you get an earful of how much they love the brand.

Wouldn’t you like to know what drives all this profitability and customer love? We thought so. And that’s why we invited Jeri Ward, the director of customer experience at Audi of America, to speak at Forrester’s Forum for Customer Experience Professionals East in New York on the morning of June 25th. 

As a preview of what you’ll hear from Jeri in just under two weeks, she agreed to answer some questions about Audi’s path to customer experience maturity.

Read on!

When did your company first begin focusing on customer experience? Why?

As a global organization, customer experience has always been a core focus of the Audi brand. Our employees and dealers live by the philosophy “Kundenbegeisterung,” which simply stated means “inspiring customer delight.” But it’s more than that. It’s going above and beyond, exceeding the expectations of our customers, and providing the very best experiences possible for our current and future drivers. It’s creating lifelong Audi fans.

“It’s not about what’s your best option. This is your only option”

Those were the words of an airline employee in Pittsburgh, following the cancellation of my flight to Washington, D.C. The agent had put me onto the next available flight. There was nothing more to do about the situation, and my questions were a waste of her time. The pressure on me to accept my fate and let her go home could hardly have been less subtle.

Most of us would like to think that we’re more customer-centric than that individual. However, unless we check the self-centered tendencies of our organizations, we run the risk of being every bit as difficult to deal with — expecting customers to adapt to our language, practices, and policies. That won’t cut it anymore because customers have plenty of options. Companies that want to thrive today had better understand how to meet or exceed their customers' expectations throughout their journeys.

That’s where customer journey maps come in. These tools are proving their value to companies that want to improve customer experience. When they’re used in strategic discussions, training exercises, and design practices, they help stakeholders throughout the organization to keep in mind the processes, needs, and perceptions of customers who are trying to achieve their goals. In my recent research on "Tools For Mastering The Customer Experience Ecosystem," I explained how the packaged vacation firm, TUI, used journey maps to plan for the future of vacationers' end-to-end experiences and how a logistics firm used journey maps to improve customers' experience with its parcel tracking service. 

If you think that translating your website into Chinese will fully serve your Chinese customers’ needs, you’re wrong. In fact, there’s no guarantee that translated content will even meet your Chinese customers’ most basic needs. But even if the content is useful, firms need to ensure that localized sites meet the other two components of the customer experience pyramid — they must be easy to use and enjoyable. 

Thousands of years of rich cultural heritage and Chinese consumers’ unique offline behaviors have shaped a set of needs, expectations, and perceptions that differ from those of their Western counterparts. Add the technical constraints that have defined Chinese site development, and customer experience professionals face an uphill battle in trying to solve the riddle of the Chinese online market. My new report, "What Chinese Consumers Expect From Website Experiences," answers three critical website design questions:

• What makes a website useful to Chinese users?
• What makes a website easy to use for Chinese users?
• What makes a website enjoyable for Chinese users?

This morning we released the latest version of an annual client favorite: “How Companies Improved Their CXi Scores, 2013.”

As we do each year, we compiled a list of brands whose scores went up five or more points in our Customer Experience Index over the past year (in this case, between 2012 and 2013). We asked CX leaders from those brands if they’d be willing to tell us what they did to drive those improvements. Finally, we synthesized their answers into a list of best practices that others can learn from.

As you’d expect, we heard about a host of projects designed to boost the three aspects of customer experience quality. Here’s just a sampling of what we uncovered:

• Meets needs. Marriott used one of my favorite qualitative research techniques — diary studies — to understand exactly when its guests would need a mobile device during their travels. The firm identified roughly 300 user needs that a mobile device could fill, prioritized them, and is using the resulting hierarchy as a road map for future investment.
• Easy. Vanguard and Progressive were just two of the brands that said they upgraded website designs to make it easier for customers to get the information they need online.
• Enjoyable. Days Inns trained more than 20,000 employees on how to make hotel guests feel welcomed.