KwikFit.nl is the consumer favorite when it comes to online APK inspection bookings with a WPS score of 87. This is shown by the most recent digital orientation research on online APK inspection requests. We spoke with Arjan van der Meer, marketing director of KwikFit. About market leadership, service that makes you happy, enormous CRM challenges and delivering offline what you promise online.
Congratulations, Arjan van der Meer! You won, the gap was enormous and it wasn't the first time KwikFit has won this research. How important is it for you to be the best?
"I find that very important. We all want to stay ahead together. For me it's also confirmation that we've done what customers want, that what we do is understood and appreciated. Of course we hear through various channels that people find it easy and pleasant to book with us, but with this research we get a more official stamp of approval. I do realize that our good findability has a big impact on the score and that we're a very large, well-known brand, which earns us bonus points. But well, we've worked thirty years for that. That's something we've earned ourselves and something we naturally want to maintain."
You're playing quite a different game with KwikFit: many people find car maintenance an unpleasant story and don't really want to spend money on it. That seems challenging...
"I always say: we're a kind of dentist. Everyone wants good teeth, but nobody wants to spend money on it and a dentist visit is experienced as unpleasant. People all want to have a car themselves, but the maintenance should cost nothing really. At the Efteling we stand waiting an hour laughing for a ride but when people have to wait ten minutes with us, it's already annoying. That's something we as a company and our people in the shops have to deal with: that people are quicker to say 'Too bad, is that repair really necessary?'
"So we said a year and a half ago that we want to distinguish ourselves as the most customer-friendly garage. I know this is quite an ambitious statement, but it's good to set the bar high. Service that makes you happy, people say: 'that's not possible?' I say it is possible. People can, even with us, really drive away with a smile. We carry this service idea through everywhere. In the garages, in our support office where a hundred people sit and also in our digital environments.
What we promise online, we must deliver in the garages. With us it's very much about trust: many people have no idea what happens during an APK, what we all look at and what we check. That means you have to give a lot of explanation about that, online. And that's also what we do, not only putting as much content as possible on our website, but trying to provide people with answers as quickly as possible through FAQs."
Is that one of the things that's going well at KwikFit now: explaining a lot of things and being transparent about it?
"That transparency is really very important. Because we have the reputation of being a very commercial company. We're slowly trying to change that image. We've always been a very open company, you get a price in advance. You get to see all your parts, you get everything we've replaced back home with you, that's offered to you at least.
We notice that people don't take the time to let us inform them properly about what we've done. They're often in a hurry, they believe it. And yet they don't have a positive feeling about it because what we've done is often invisible. We need to show people very clearly which parts exactly have been replaced and why that was necessary. That's incredibly important for trust."
What role do customer research and putting the customer central play in your daily work?
"They're very important. The danger exists that you start doing what you like yourself, what gives you a good feeling, but you yourself are simply not the average customer. If you want to know who the average customer is, then you have to go to the household fair once and sit on a chair there for a day. I did that for the first time this year: very good for the awareness that you yourself are not average Netherlands.
You need research. Hip people in marketing departments who read marketing magazines, go to seminars and come up with the wildest ideas online, should ask themselves whether customers also appreciate those ideas. Because that's what it's ultimately about, not about who's the hippest company. It's ultimately about making money.
We do customer research in various ways. We do mystery shopping ourselves, we send surveys to all customers who have been, we do NPS measurements. Consumer panels are also great. Put five consumers, customer or not, in a room. Put a camera on it and go sit in another room with three colleagues to watch and learn."
Read also: The value of customer journey experience benchmarking
What is your biggest digital challenge?
"From a marketing perspective, that's really CRM. Over the years, everything has been changed and added to various systems. Under all those 'houses' that we have standing in the field of databases, an underground tunnel must now come so that you don't have to walk through the rain from one house to the other. That's a gigantic operation, there are various providers involved, who built all those separate little houses back then.
I just want to be able to see with one press of a button that you, if you come to a branch today, are there for the 25th time and I want to be able to congratulate you with that. That information is all there. But I wouldn't know how I could rake all that together in a quick way right now. The difference between us and purely online parties is that we have no fewer than 175 physical shops. There are people standing there, not robots. There are also employees there who only bought a smartphone last year. They can deal well with customers and know an enormous amount about cars, but those aren't people who have much affinity with online or CRM systems...
I have to offer them all information at the right moment via CRM and make it easy for them. The big challenge is therefore to do the right things with the enormous data streams we have: I try to make everything measurable, do everything step by step and achieve success after success. After all, you can measure everything, look back and evaluate. Data streams are really the gold of this company."
How do you view service in relation to sales? Could service ultimately be the new sales in your industry?
"That was always the case, but due to the transparency of the internet it's becoming increasingly important. I believe that people are gradually willing to pay more for good service. My washing machine broke recently, I'd had it for five years, bought it online somewhere and I no longer had the receipt and no idea where I bought that appliance back then. And then? Then I went to the local Expert shop. They figured it all out for me with the provider and arranged the warranty. The next time I need to have a refrigerator, even if it's eighty euros more expensive, I'll buy it from that man."
Are there still nice developments in the pipeline at KwikFit within your area of attention, besides CRM? What (digital) innovations are you working on?
"I find transparency very important, I would most like to be able to send you a photo of your worn brake disc while you're at work to show you that it's really necessary to replace it. We need to automate that. From the customer's perspective, that's perfect, getting an invoice with the photos included. For us it's important to do what customers are really waiting for and there's still a lot to be gained there. Many things will change of course, also for us, with the arrival of electric cars. But there are many opportunities in the short term: serving customers better and providing meaningful information. We're mainly going to focus on making car maintenance even more transparent. That's service that makes our customers happy!"
