Volkswagen is celebrating a significant national accolade with the news that the brand’s Blended Retailing initiative has been named ‘Retail Innovation of the Year’ in the 2016 Retail Systems Awards.
The awards, which celebrate technology excellence and innovation across the entire retail industry – not simply the automotive sector – saw Volkswagen UK’s pioneering initiative triumph in the hard-fought ‘Retail Innovation’ category, seeing off finalists including Tesco Labs in the process.
Announcing the Retail Innovation of the Year the judges said: “This year’s award commends a highly successful digital strategy that has been applied to both sales and aftersales services.”
Volkswagen UK’s pioneering Blended Retailing concept is not a single digital innovation or initiative. It’s a strategy, a process, and a toolkit; a suite of digital enablers which combine the online world, the showroom experience and highly trained staff in a seamless journey through the vehicle purchase and ownership experience.
Engaging with customers outside the traditional car showroom environment and leveraging the opportunities presented by the digital space, Blended Retailing merges ‘bricks’ with ‘clicks’ to create a unified proposition for Volkswagen customers.
Joe Wilkinson, Volkswagen UK Digital Experience Manager, said: “In launching Blended Retailing we had the clear ambition to embed it in the heart of how our Retail teams operate. We built a clear vision of what an integrated customer journey would look like, based on the most innovative behaviours we could identify from our own research and from looking at what the most successful retailers in other industry sectors were doing.
“These days, clearly, the customer journey starts online and our award-winning Volkswagen.co.uk website is the jumping off point for Blended Retailing. The ‘My Perfect Volkswagen’ tool allows a customer to outline their requirements, presenting them with their perfect match. From this point they can configure their ideal specification, book a test drive and share their configuration with a Retailer.
“Crucially, this configuration can then be picked up by the sales executive on their iPad when the customer visits the showroom. The iPad app also uses video to explain technology and create a personalised digital brochure.
“Volkswagen showrooms are no longer home to traditional physical brochures; instead of 50+ pages of generic product content, the sales executive works with the customer to refine their specification and put together a brochure unique to them with images, video, pricing, technical info etc giving all the specific information they need to make their decision.”
The iPad allows them to check stock that is a close match to their configuration, complete a valuation of their trade-in, and explain how finance programmes work. Once the car is ordered the customer can track the progress of the vehicle online from the factory, supporting the dialog between the customer and the sales executive. Indeed, this dialog is increasingly is in the form of personalised video messaging giving extra warmth and personality.
Ian Plummer, Head of Sales Operations at Volkswagen UK said: “Away from the new car sales area, as we integrate Blended Retailing into used car sales and aftersales, the effect is just as positive – adding value to the customer experience across the board.
“Now that we’ve proved the effectiveness of Blended Retailing, the rest of the Volkswagen world has taken note too. Our approach has been adopted as a best practice model by Volkswagen globally and awards such as this prestigious prize from Retail Systems underscore our belief in this innovative strategy.”
