Volkswagen has announced the appointment of its former Chief Development Officer Markus Kleimann as the company’s new Chief Experience Officer, in an effort to showcase and strengthen its commitment to customer experience.
In his new role, Kleimann will work to ensure that the customers’ expectations and requirements are integrated into every stage of product and service development. His newly created team will work on a new interface to manage the user experience.
“For us, an integrated customer experience means utilizing customer feedback in the further development of our products and services. This is crucial in the competition for the most satisfied customers,” Kleimann said in a press release. “With our new unit, we are creating the framework that will enable us to incorporate customer requirements into our offering more quickly and consistently in the future. It is especially important to make our services intuitive to use, to integrate them into our customers’ lives and experience, and to forecast new developments.”
As Volkswagen’s Chief Development Officer, Kleimann was responsible for the development of the company’s G3 series vehicle models. As the head of strategy in South America and countries such as China, he led the definition and development of market-specific products tailored to regional customer requirements such as Virtus and Taigo in Brazil.
Volkswagen is speeding up its digital transformation and keeping pace on its path to becoming a software-based manufacturer. A new data-based business model, software integration in vehicles and a digital ecosystem will be added to advance the company’s core competencies.
“Now more than ever before, an integrated customer experience and the rapid implementation of customers’ requirements have become a key differentiating factor,” said Ralf Brandstätter, CEO of the Volkswagen brand. “Volkswagen is evolving into a customer-centric tech company. With our accelerated strategy, we have aligned our processes even more strongly with our customers’ needs – from the early development of our vehicles, through the configuration and purchase of a car and our digital service offering, to workshop visits.”
