Customer Retention in the Automotive Industry

The intensely competitive global automotive industry is in the midst of both a quality evolution and management transfonnation. In an evolutionary fashion, industry attention has progressed from a focus on internal quality, to external perceptions of customer satisfaction, to subsequent customer retention and profitability. More transfonnational is the change in the way automotive companies operate and manage themselves. An industry once dominated at a product level by engineering and a management level by fmance is becoming a cross functional, customer oriented industry. Understanding the links from quality to satisfaction to retention has become a key to financial and organizational success as the automotive industry enters the new millennium. We are fortunate, in this regard, to have assembled a diverse group of both academic and automotive industry contributors to offer a variety of insights into these links. After describing the ongoing changes in the automotive industry in more detail, this introductory chapter describes a framework for linking quality, satisfaction, and retention. The framework is used to introduce each of the individual chapters and highlight its contribution. Although our primary emphasis is on the automotive industry, the implications of the research and lessons learned extend far beyond. If anything, the automotive industry is a prototypical competitive, global industry that faces a myriad of business issues. These include, among others, issues pertaining to product development, service development, process improvement, product quality, service quality, supplier relationships, internal customer satisfaction, external customer satisfaction, retailing, promotion, pricing, franchising, and technology management.

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Autorentext

Die Herausgeber
Universitätsrofessor Dr. Andreas Herrmann ist Inhaber des Lehrstuhls für ABWL und Marketing der Universtiät Mainz.
Professor Michael D. Johnson ist Inhaber des Lehrstuhls für Marketing am National Quality Research Center der Universität Michigan.
Frank Huber ist wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter am Lehrstuhl von Professor Dr. Hans H. Bauer der Unversität Mannheim.
Anders Gustafsson ist Privatdozent am Quality Technology and Management Institut der Universität Linköping (Schweden).

Die Autoren
Die Autoren sind renommierte Fachvertreter aus Wissenschaft und Unternehmenspraxis.

Inhalt
1 An Introduction to Quality, Satisfaction, and Retention-Implications for the Automotive Industry.- 2 Linking Satisfaction to Design-A Key to Success for Volvo.- 3 Improved Customer Satisfaction Is Volvo Priority.- 4 Design of Lines as a Product-Policy Variant to Retain Customers in the Automotive Industry.- 5 From Value-Orientated Quality Improvement to Customer Satisfaction-A Case Study for Passenger Cars.- 6 Achieving Customer Satisfaction, Loyalty, and Retention Through Strategic Alignment.- 7 The Complex Relationship between Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty for Automobiles.- 8 Method Supplied Investigation of Customer Loyalty in the Automotive Industry-Results of a Causal Analytical Study.- 9 Strategic Loyalty Management-Some Reflections Regarding Customer Retention Instruments in the Automotive Industry.- 10 The Case of Mercedes-Benz-Quality in Customer Retention Management.- 11 The BMW Customer Report-Dealer Satisfaction as a Strategic Success Factor for High Brand Loyalty.- 12 Customer Satisfaction and Customer Loyalty in the Automotive Industry-Results of an Empirical Study.- 13 Customer Retention in the Automotive Industry-An Economic Analysis.- 14 The Value of Passenger Car Customers.