My Metric for Success: Earn Customers For Life

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My metric for success can be summed up in one phrase:  earn customers for life.

Today’s auto industry is at an inflection point.  I’ve said before that social and technological changes are rewriting the rules of vehicle use and ownership.  I firmly believe that personal transportation will change more in the next five years than it has in the last 50.

In the face of such dramatic change, it’s more important than ever that we at GM know who we are and why we are here.  It’s critical that we take our core values to heart and live the behaviors we need to win in today’s hyper-competitive global auto industry.  All this starts by putting customers at the center of everything we do.

In every area of the company, from engineering and design to R&D and sales, we listen intently to our customers’ needs.  We focus on innovations that delight, like streaming the back-up camera to the rearview mirror.  We introduce technologies that add value, like the all-electric Chevrolet Bolt EV, which will travel more than 200 miles on a single charge.  And we work on earning customers for life with services no other carmaker can offer, like OnStar, which has responded to more 1.2 billion customer requests since we introduced it 20 years ago.

How do I measure my metric?

There are, of course, many ways to measure customer satisfaction, from sales figures and loyalty scores to quality rankings and third-party surveys.  Each of these measures has meaning and value, but for me one of the best ways to gauge the real-world impact of our strategy is to hear directly from the people who buy and drive our cars, trucks and crossovers.  Fortunately, I have this opportunity every day – in letters and emails, in conversations and social media, even in our Customer Engagement Centers, where I’ve talked directly with our customers.

Through these and other channels, I’ve heard from a long-time GM customer in West Virginia who recently purchased his 13th Cadillac; an expecting mother in Mexico who received quick medical attention thanks to OnStar’s “Automatic Crash Response”; a nun from Ohio whose five-hour drive in a Chevrolet Cruze was “driving perfection”; the customer from New Delhi whose family bought one of the first Opel Astras sold in India 17 years ago and has stuck with GM ever since; and the owners of a tree service in Massachusetts who continue to rely on their workhorse 2003 Chevy Silverado with more than 500,000 hard-earned miles.

I receive these stories as they come in – one at a time – which is how it should be.  Because that’s exactly how we earn customers at GM:  one at a time.

We remind ourselves every day that behind the enormous changes reshaping the global auto industry, we remain at heart a relationship business.  We will never forget that on the other end of our technology are customers and family members counting on our cars and trucks to get them safely and efficiently where they need to go.  That’s why my metric will always be customers, and why we measure our progress one customer at a time.