German carmaker Audi lost its number one spot in the Indian luxury car market to compatriot Mercedes-Benz last year — selling 11,192 units to M-B’s 13,502 — but Audi India head Joe King expressed satisfaction with the company’s 2015 performance, saying that it was the ninth successive year of growth, “with more than 30 model variants in the country, more than 90 customer touch points, over 52,000 Audi customers since we came in 2007. For me that’s the perfect foundation to go into 2016.”
The company recently launched its Q7, and will soon bring in the new A4. “There will be will be more than 10 new launches in 2016,” Mr King said, but hastened to add that the priority at the moment is not to be number one but to develop a strong foundation for a sustainable profitable growth in India.
“From my point of view, we are in a marathon and not a sprint. It is really important in a market like India that you have the fundamentals really strong. In a developing market, you will have drops. Unless you have a really strong foundation, the business will crumble.”
As part of its strategy, the company is also opening service centres in locations where it has lots of customers but no showrooms. “As the market grows, on the same structure we can build showroom and we can expand into used car business,” Mr King said. The first three such centres are coming up in Hubli, Thiruvananthapuram and Jodhpur.
Technical feedback
Mr King spoke about how the company collects technical feedback in India.
He said the company examines and collates concerns from Indian customers, including recurring ones, which could be product-related or perception-related. The Audi AG board goes through it “with great detail” once a year with the team to really understand if any product needs any rectification and is cleared straightaway, he said.
He added, “We have the technical reference market, one of the only six in the world. We have a lot of technical data that goes into the development of our whole products range, even cars that are not in India. That technical feedback goes into product development. All the cars prior to launch are tested for more than 20,000 km in India. So any car that is going to be launched is given extensive testing here and the feedback goes to pre-production”.
Mr King also said that human resource training programmes developed in India would be exported to its retail staff around the world. The training programme “is now taken by Audi AG… (it has) seen what we have done, and is going to roll it out around the world”.
Explaining the programme, called Neev (which means ‘foundation’), he said it was about human resources practice in the company’s retail structure, putting in performance culture and reward mechanisms for all dealership staff and key performance indicator measurements.
He added, “It may not be a new product that is going to be rolled out around the world but some of these great ideas we have developed here (in India) are being recognised and taken globally”.
All the company’s sales staff in India have undergone the training, while 50–60 per cent of the after sales employees have gone through it as well. — PTI
