The document discusses ensuring consistent brand experience across supply chains in the automotive industry. It notes that brand experience is defined by interactions at all touchpoints, and inconsistent experiences can damage brand perception. Specifically for automobiles, customer experience with dealers directly impacts the brand image, even if the vehicle and website are excellent. Transitioning from rigid supply chains to flexible supply networks allows for more differentiated customer experiences.

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Thought Paper
Re-imagineering
Supply Chains –
Delivering An
Integrated Brand
Experience
Convergence >> Collaboration >> Co-creation

2. Ensuring Consistent Brand Experience at the Last Mile 3
Making the Transition from a Supply Chain to a Supply Network 5
Understanding Cultural Nuances and Gender Sensitivities 6
CONTENTS

3. Supply chains are no longer just about moving material
from one point to another – they are now about
delivering a moving experience. This experience
determines brand perception and is becoming critical
to success in the market. Brand experience is the
cumulative experience that a company delivers to its
customers through each touch-point and each point of
interaction. If the customer experience is compelling at
all touch-points, it results in high brand recall and
loyalty. If even one customer touch-point falls out of
step or does not measure up to the brand promise or
expectation, it puts the promise of the brand in
question. Customers then start looking elsewhere; they
stop advocating.
Take the case of an automotive industry for instance. A
vehicle is the tangible product, with its own supply chain
of raw materials, component manufacturers,
transporters and logistics providers, and distribution
chains. The vehicle is delivered to the consumer through
dealers who provide the pre-sales and sales services,
and serviced post-sale through their maintenance
workshops for continued health and reliability of the
vehicle. Other service providers like breakdown services,
insurers and accessory providers, help complete the
‘brand ownership’ experience. How consistent is this
experience? Whose brand is impacted?
There are multiple players involved in delivering any brand
experience. The brand promise is made by the parent and is
usually associated with the parent brand and not just with the last
mile. An unpleasant experience at the last mile reflects badly on the
parent brand. This is specifically true for the automotive industry. A
customer's impression about an automotive brand is defined by
the cumulative experience she gets from the dealer from pre-sales
through sales and after-sales service. The automotive company
may have the most refreshingly welcoming website and the most
sophisticated, safest and fuel-efficient car, but if the dealer staff is
rude or the experience is unpleasant, then the brand image of the
company suffers.
Since almost every automotive organization uses services of third
party dealers, the dealer can either enhance or completely ruin the
hard-earned brand image of the parent. For most automotive
companies, this is an incredibly threatening aspect. The real
challenge is in ensuring that each partnering third-party will deliver
the same experience that your brand is promising, consistently,
over time.
Controlling the brand experience at the last mile is a challenging
task as one has to first have the right partner. Is the partner even
capable of giving a differentiated experience to the customer?
Once you engage with a partner, how do you ensure that the
right experience and message is being delivered? When a
customer walks in and how does a partner recognize the real value
of the relationship?
Thus, there is a need for a formal process for evaluating partners
from their appointment through to engagement and continuously
assessing how well they are doing. While CRM systems give a
complete 360 degree view of the customer, they cannot reveal the
Ensuring Consistent Brand
Experience at the Last Mile
3
SALES
TRANSPORTATION
CUSTOMER
SUPPLY CHAIN
SUPPLIERS
DEPARTMENT
CUSTOMERS
INVENTORY
DELIVERED
TACTICAL
RAW
ORDER
VALUES
MANAGEMENT
PRODUCTSPURCHASING
MATERIALS LOGISTICS
WAREHOUSE
COMPANY
PLANNING
DECISIONS
DEPARTMENT
PLANNING

4. 4
Automotive Supply Chain
Levels in the Chain Raw Material Suppliers
Tier 2 Supplier
Tier 1 Supplier
Dealers
Original Equipment
Manufacturer (OEM)
• Manufactures
sub-components for a
number of basic automobile
components
- Tier 2 suppliers are well
integrated in the supply
chains of major tier 1
suppliers
- Operate on thin margins
• Assembles the components and produces the automobile
- Few & specialized players
- Most critical link in the entire value chain
- Implements & drives innovation & efficiency across the entire chain
• Dedicated points of scale for each OEM
- Usually have sound financial background & market presence
- Provide after sales support to customers
- Represent OEM to the customers, thus critical for overall
customer satisfaction
• Make major components for the OEMs
- Highly integrated into the supply chain
of major OEMs
- Usually dedicatedly supply to a
major OEM
mindset of a customer and her motivations. For example, some
customers tend to be demanding and some customers tend to be
passively submissive. Sadly, the most demanding customers are not
always the most important customers. Sometimes the most passive
customers will very quietly tolerate all the pain that a company is
giving them and simply not come back or promote you. They may
never come to you with a complaint, they stay silent, but silence
does not mean they are pleased. They may be suffering in silence,
and at the first opportunity, will actively seek out an alternative.
In the service industry, it is not the routine services that matter,
when all is going well. What matters is handling things well when
things go bad. When you look back at how an exceptional
condition was handled, that is where a relationship was made or
broken. That becomes the weakest link in the whole supply chain.
Contractual agreements cover events that are normal and routine.
What happens when things go wrong? Even, if issues are
escalated, they seldom get resolved in a timely manner and most
often, exceptional conditions are not covered by any contract.
That’s when the attitude and customer orientation of the dealer
come to the rescue – they can salvage the situation and cement
the relationship or they can break it forever.
All automotive firms use elaborate and lengthy customer
satisfaction surveys at every step of the relationship. Unfortunately
they are seldom taken seriously by either the customer or the
dealer. One way to resolve this is by asking two fundamental
questions to the customer: one, would you come back to this
dealer again? Two, would you recommend this car and / or dealer
to anybody else? Answers to these two fundamental questions
determine what the customer thinks about your brand and will buy
again or not. Companies should aggregate these insights and give
a rating to the dealer depending on what a customer thinks about
the dealer, and the brand, as a consequence. This feedback has to
be taken very seriously and acted upon promptly.
Getting feedback is only the first feedback. Prompt action of the
feedback determines how customers will perceive it. When
feedback shows something is not right, the promptness or delay in
taking remedial and preventive action will determine the customers’
brand perception.
Information systems must therefore track measures such as how
quickly from the time the experience was delivered, does somebody
come to know that something was not right and is if something was
not right, how quickly and completely it was acted upon? This is now
becoming an important dimension of assessing dealer maturity and
experience quality. Dealers are competitively rated on parameters like
this and earning or losing benefits as a result. Such a rating could
determine the cost at which OE spare parts are sold to the dealer. As
this affects the dealer's margins, it is in the dealer's interest to
enhance customer satisfaction by taking such feedback seriously.

5. 5
Making the Transition from a Supply Chain
to a Supply Network
Making the Transition from a Supply Chain
to a Supply Network
Supply chains have a linear, tightly coupled relationship between
partners and other constituent members. Therefore, they are
predictable, easy to manage because of linear information and
material flow, and can be made extremely efficient. However, there
is no differentiation at the end of the day apart from efficiency and
cycle-time, having limited impact on the customer experience and
impact on the brand. This is where a move from supply chain to a
supply network enables a differentiated experience to be delivered
to the customer.
In a supply network, unlike a supply chain, there are still
relationships - but these are loose relationships. These are not
hard-coded and hard-wired relationships as we have in supply
chains. There is a tacit understanding between constituent players
that depending on the need, different relationships may be called
into play. It’s an agreement between equals that says, ‘When I
need you, I will tap into you and your network’. When one member
of the network has a transaction to process, it decides which node
to activate to complete the transaction most effectively (not
efficiently), since the objective is now the experience delivered. This
choice determines whether the transaction becomes a pleasant
one or an unpleasant one for the customer.
Supply networks allow firms to activate nodes which are required
for completing a transaction only for the duration of the particular
transaction. In a network, many things are connected together, but
the path that is chosen through the network is determined by the
best way to service a transaction.
For example, in Asia Pacific, most people experience traffic jams
as a matter of routine in its densely populated cities. If a customer
has to deliver her car to a dealer for servicing, she has to first get
her car to the dealer in the morning, wading through dense traffic,
and then come in the evening again wading through the same
traffic again to get it back. So we have a situation where there is a
huge queue of impatient owners wanting to give their car for
service in the morning and, again in the evening, a huge crowd of
irate owners who want to get their vehicle back. At both ends the
customer is wasting her time which is not a happy situation. If a
dealer can deliver a time-guaranteed service within say, half an
hour, and offer this option at a premium, - it not only increases the
utilization of a dealer's assets, but is also extremely beneficial to a
customer who would be pleased to pay the premium to save time
and frustration. Capacity shortfalls can be filled using spare
capacity somewhere else in the network.
Workshops traditionally work on a capacity utilization model. To the
kind of premium service described above dealers have to change
their mindset from saying 'This is the capacity that I have to fill' to
'This is the capacity that I have to find'. A dealer now has to think,
‘Where can I pull my people from?’, and ‘Which bay can I use?’.
‘Which bay can I free up for servicing this spot demand?’ ‘What
sequence of work should I do that it takes the shortest possible
time?’. ‘What should I keep ready and kitted?’ ‘Which node in my
network should I activate?’ The complete focus of the information
system changes and this may require radical logic re-design of
older systems. What's more? If a customer prefers coming at a
lean time, she can get a discount. This is a win-win model for the
dealer, the customer and ultimately, the automotive company.
Customer
Acquisition
Customer
Preservation
Custom
er Service

6. 6
Customer empathy is as valuable in designing a competitively
differentiated experience, as is gender sensitivity and
understanding cultural and local nuances. Today more and more
women own and drive cars. However, the problems they will face
and report in driving a car can be completely different from a man.
A dealer must ensure that the service staff is well-trained and
sensitized to handle different kinds of customer needs and issues,
especially if they are gender or culture related.
They must also have access to a real-time information system so
that they can actually accept feedback and diagnose causes for
customer unhappiness and dissatisfaction promptly. As an
illustration, if the customer service representative at the dealer
carries an i-Pad with audio recordings of the different sounds,
normal and abnormal that a car can typically make, and heard from
the driver’s vantage point, it can help is in a far sharper diagnostic
with correct remedial action. If a customer is able to identify a
sound accurately, the service representative can pinpoint the cause
which will make a huge difference in the way a customer thinks
about the brand.
Understanding Cultural Nuances and
Gender Sensitivities
Understanding Cultural Nuances and
Gender Sensitivities
In the end, it is about leveraging the combination of information
technology, information systems, human capital, incentives and
measures, relationships and a service attitude that determines
customer loyalty for a brand. Supply networks are becoming the
game changers today, supported by flexible foundational
information systems. Networks offer flexibility, responsiveness and
the ability to deliver the unique experience that sets the brand
apart from the rest of the pack. This change must be adopted and
exploited to mutual benefit.

7. D_57_030214
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