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New, innovative website experience increases speed and site traffic
FAW-VOLKSWAGEN and IBM
Increasing customer expectations around dynamic user experience drives innovation
At present, the automobile goes beyond the simple concept of “transportation” and has become an expression and extension of personal preferences, smart device usage habits, travel scenarios and lifestyles. Improving the user experience has become the strategic center of car companies, and this is a new, unprecedented, dynamic challenge with no prior experience to reference.
IBM Consulting® and FAW-VOLKSWAGEN continued to move forward on the basis of the previous cooperation to dramatically reshape the main customer experience on FAW-VOLKSWAGEN’s corporate website. Through the joint efforts of FAW-VOLKSWAGEN and IBM Consulting, a new, diversified official website was officially launched on 27 March 2024, offering a more personalized and interactive user experience that has led to a significant increase in user visits.
Reshaping the website around three pillars of success
Guan Haihe, Project Lead for the FAW-VOLKSWAGEN official website revamp, notes, “The excellent performance of the new official website is due to three points: first, the innovative product-design model; second, it realizes the exchange of information and data; the third is to adopt product-based operation.”
The 3 pillars of success:
- In the new website design stage, IBM® Design Thinking methods were used to gain insight into the needs and pain points of different website users (consumers, potential customers, visitors, job seekers, media, partners), lay a solid foundation and uncover subtleties for more engagement. This way, FAW-VOLKSWAGEN's core information—such as corporate brand, technology and services—can be created from the perspective of users, in their language to ensure that the information is clear for them. At the same time, the integration of AI design tools into the process to accelerate creative output and incubation, forms a new layout of four major sections of the official website: brand, product, technology and service. That helps users understand the information of a high-quality car from strict experiments to intelligent production processes, from factory production to driving on the road, and focus on the actual scenarios car users face to create customer value by serving the whole lifecycle of users.
- To transform the concept of “user-centric” from a familiar slogan to a simple, intuitive and easy-to-use experience for users, the company decided to start from different aspects to improve interactivity. To this end, FAW-VOLKSWAGEN proposed a new slogan for the official website, "Simple, @FAW-VOLKSWAGEN." Under the guidance of this original intention, the company's official website achieved content integration, information sharing and a considerable degree of data exchange with the websites of the three brands—Volkswagen, Audi, Jetta—and internal websites such as recruitment. Taking the cross-site search function of the new official website as an example, users can obtain demand information through a "one-stop" intelligent search engine, and with the support of data exchange and data analysis, they gain more targeted content and product recommendations. Subsequently, as more data is accessed, more personalized functions will be presented.
- To improve the openness and agile iteration ability of the official website operation, the project adopted a people-focused perspective to design and develop the company's official website and achieved "no-code" operation and webpage release. With this model, teams can quickly create new content and respond to business needs faster.
For the new website, building a comprehensive and seamless customer experience, and the integration of online and offline features were also a critical part of the project. Now, taking the service product of "Quality Tour" as an example, users can log in to the new official website to make an appointment for "Quality Tour", and visit FAW-VOLKSWAGEN's five bases of R&D, production, quality assurance laboratories and other places, to experience every detail in person. This allows users to understand the car, discover the people behind it appreciate the beauty of the industry and naturally enhance their trust in the brand.
On the day of launch, the number of user visits to the new official website reached 84,000, an increase of 18 times, and the average visit time was 136 seconds, an increase of 40 times, compared with the previous official website. "Many colleagues came to me to tell me that the new website is not only visually amazing, but also silky in terms of interaction!” said Guan Haihe, the person in charge of the FAW-VOLKSWAGEN official website remodeling project.
In the AI era, the relationship between people and vehicles is a closer partnership, and future projects will be driven by digitalization and intelligence. In the future, enterprise official websites will make more use of AI models to empower user scenarios and enhance the user experience. This will improve the operational efficiency of the platform with data-driven capabilities to enable AI business innovation in these two aspects:
- Delivering a new user-centered experience with the help of AI and data
Business scenarios: FAW-VOLKSWAGEN has a large number of user touchpoints and data accumulation, and the new official website fully accesses and utilizes data resources to form a personalized experience. The official website will access more consumer data in the future and connect with the accumulated operational data to design more convenient application scenarios online. In the future, the "personal center" of the official website will access data such as orders, after-sales services, and vehicle terminals. It uses AI technology to provide users with a variety of more personalized and unexpected customer services to respond to and support customers more quickly, accurately and autonomously.
Marketing scenarios: AI empowers users to improve the quality of leads, clean up and score leads, focus on tracking high-potential opportunities, optimize product marketing communication and provide this feedback to the company's official website. This helps customers get a more targeted experience in the car selection process before purchasing a car and drives the increase in transaction rates.
Feedback scenarios: The channels and methods of user expression are rich and complex and the official website is an important bridge with users to collect a large amount of user feedback information. This massive amount of structured and unstructured information contains customer emotions, and demands that the company can extract and analyze to enable targeted and customized customer experience improvement plans.
After-sales scenarios: With customer authorization, it’s possible to analyze customer maintenance and driving behavior data, identify high-value customers and generate personalized marketing and customer retention strategies. The business can also integrate feedback into R&D and production links, and optimize the experience of all aspects of the vehicle lifecycle through AI to form a closed-loop synergy.
- Managing the official website traffic with the operational efficiency of the platform
The new website allows tracking key metrics, such as page views (PV), unique visitors (UV), registration numbers and traffic conversion rates to enable accurate analytics and enhance customer engagement.
Additionally, by integrating online and offline communication and marketing capabilities, online content optimization can be carried out to quickly produce content, visual and interactive functions for the official website, and increase interactivity. Using AI tools, operators can design, execute and optimize content, shorten the related work from a month to a few days and focus more on business goals and creative direction. Highly personalized content brought traffic growth, and improved the overall performance of official website operations. At the same time, with the help of an AI enterprise brand assistant, the generated content fully complies with corporate brand specifications and helps improve high-quality operation efficiency.
Digital transformation is a process of multiple systems moving forward side by side, and the success of the reshaping of the company's official website represents a great leap forward for FAW-VOLKSWAGEN in terms of the user experience. In the future, FAW-VOLKSWAGEN and IBM will work together to create more outstanding results in digital transformation in different fields. Yan Ning, general manager of IBM Consulting's customer transformation services business in Greater China, concluded: "In the years of in-depth cooperation between the two parties, IBM has always been committed to accompanying FAW-VOLKSWAGEN from concept design to technical gestalt, and jointly building high-quality innovation projects to cultivate new quality productivity and promote sustainable business development."
FAW-VOLKSWAGEN Co., Ltd. (link resides outside of ibm.com), founded on February 6, 1991, is a large-scale passenger car manufacturer jointly operated by China FAW Co., Ltd., Volkswagen AG, Audi AG and Volkswagen (China) Investment Co., Ltd. The company has three brands: Volkswagen, Audi and Jetta, and its products can cover the comfort market and luxury market.
In the process of rapid development, FAW-VOLKSWAGEN's technical research and development strength has been continuously enhanced. At present, the company has industry-leading R&D test facilities such as automobile test site, new technology development center, new energy center, bench test, acoustic test, and so on, and has the ability to test the whole process from parts to vehicles, which further consolidates the advantages of FAW-VOLKSWAGEN in the field of technological innovation in the future.
At present, FAW-VOLKSWAGEN has win-win cooperation with more than 2,400 Tier 1 suppliers to jointly build an excellent supply chain system. Cooperate with more than 1,700 dealers to provide consumers with better and more convenient car services.
After more than 30 years of development, FAW-VOLKSWAGEN has formed a national vehicle production base covering Changchun in Northeast China, Chengdu in Southwest China, Foshan in South China, Qingdao in East China and Tianjin in North China.
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