By Janus Boye
Enabling the ongoing evolution of Audi’s digital experience and creating robust, efficient and scalable technology solutions is a big part of the mission for the Digital Experience Tech team at Audi of America.
Amanda Skura heads up the team which focuses on the enablement and implementation of marketing and CRM tech alongside product development for digital business platforms.
In a recent informal member call, she shared a brief update on her work and plans for 2023. We started the conversation on how the mission connects to their everyday work.
Giving the customer freedom
As Amanda said in the opening, the mission for her team really is all about giving the customer freedom. It’s a departure from the more traditional classic sales funnel used years ago and now they focus more on key moments. More on that later.
Amanda shared this illustration on how they are working on enabling the best customer experience for Audi shoppers and owners by building a holistic digital ecosystem to power the experience
Expectations are high from customers and their journey with Audi is now much more online compared to before the pandemic where much was at the local dealer and consequently sometimes Audi lost touch.
As Amanda outlined, customers today expect:
Freedom to shop, so that their are in control of the decision making and purchase process on their terms and at their convenience
Freedom to buy, which is all about the purchase experience and efficient sales process, whether buying online or at a dealer
Freedom to own, where they do their best to embrace and support customers at each stage of the ownership cycle
Underlying this is a foundation built with both privacy and security in mind.
Digital experience technology 2023 themes
Moving onto the themes for this year, let me start by looking back to a year ago, in the beginning of 2022, where Amanda joined one of our group meetings and shared these three priorities under the ambitious headline "choose the moon":
From data awareness to data-informed
MarTech enablement
eCommerce foundation
In our call this year, Amanda mentioned these 2023 themes where you can sense the impressive progression:
Think about customers, which is all about fostering a startup mentality and giving customers freedom in their journey. It’s also about finding ways to get out and test experiences and talking to customers.
Connected data & access. As Amanda described: “When we build something, think about where the data is going and where it could be used in the future. Be domain driven - think about how services can be designed to be reusable”
eCommerce expansion, which focuses on letting customers buy parts and cars where they want to online or offline, while making it easier for them to transact.
On mini CEO’s, high value actions and more
Most of the call was an informal questions and answer session, which you can listen to in the recording shared below.
I’ll just highlight two things:
Firstly, Amanda mentioned how she is working to make her team members feel like empowered mini CEO’s. We talked a bit about the advantages of that and now it can really drive a sense of positive startup mentality to have digital leaders in the team with decision power. Still, we also scratched a bit on the surface on how mini CEO’s has the potential to cause some headache in an organization but that ultimately we need to better empower product roles.
Secondly, we talked about putting KPIs to the test, in particular performance indicators with economic value, when the loop is not a traditional sales cycle, but more an infinite loop touching owners and potential owners alike. What might be the high value actions and key moments, and can you put a financial value which you can share with top management?
Learn more about digital experience technology in 2023
We’ll naturally continue this conversation at our peer groups and conferences. Have a look and consider joining us!
You can also lean back and enjoy the 30-minute recording from the member call.