1. April 2021
Welcome to the Center Community!
The rapid technological development of the automotive industry is exerting enormous pressure for change on the vehicle trade. Networking, electrification, autonomous driving and new mobility concepts are just a few buzzwords at this point that stand for the future of the automobile and drive established car manufacturers day by day to satisfy existing and continuously changing customer needs.
Perfect, if you can now – like the Center Smart Services – fall back on a completed consortium project on the topic of “Customer Insights”. The aftersales business, which primarily takes place in regional automotive workshops and is becoming increasingly difficult to manage with an ever-increasing amount of information from the vehicles. Not least because completely new employee skills are required for electric vehicles.
As a result, customer requirements are becoming increasingly diverse, along with the demands of the vehicles, and dealing with them is becoming more and more complex.
What the automotive industry can learn from agriculture
However, this is not the first industry to face this issue. Other industries have also faced the challenge of digitization and have long since recognized the opportunities and successfully integrated them into production and service processes.
If we now compare the customer requirements of agriculture with those of automotive workshops, we can see that they are quite similar. One crucial difference is that in the repair shop sector, analog processes and rigid workflows are predominant today, whereas in agriculture, these are already “lean” and digital.
Nevertheless, it can be observed that digitalization is now also making its way into the service of automotive workshops and dealers.
In recent weeks, a bilateral project between the smart Center of the Mercedes Benz Aachen branch and the Smart Services Center has shown that digitalization is opening up completely new opportunities for exciting business models for the future smart Service. A small insight with a big impact, because of course the Aachen smart Center is now facing the challenges around the topic together with the Center Smart Services: “Recognize opportunities of digitalization and take action.”
It is clear here that the automotive industry, and in particular the service at the smart Service Center, is facing major challenges that will be tackled in the future together with the Smart Services Center.
