Ford is reshaping its fleet team to meet customer expectations over the next decade, and in doing so is sending a signal to the market that working in fleet isn’t just about bulking up sales numbers.
I caught up with Ambrose Henderson, Director of Customer Experience, Growth and Sales at Ford, and he shared some thoughts on working with fleet customers and the importance of providing them with a good experience with the brand to maintain long term relationships.
“Customer experience is often thought of as the retail experience. You know, what you do when mom and dad come into the dealership and they want to search for their new car; which is great. We’re also thinking about customer experience from a fleet perspective as well,” explains Ambrose.
“I think our fleet team have done a really wonderful job of working with customers. We have decade long customers who have stayed with Ford for a very long time. Our focus in that is really through account management and understanding the customer very deeply.”
“We have many many examples of where we’ve worked with customers, body builders, dealers, to create solutions that solve the whole need rather than, here’s the car, off you go and work with someone else.”
“Even today, we renewed another account which we’re really excited about. And the feedback from that fleet was, ‘we’re staying with you and we’re committing even more to you because of that engagement we have from you’. And one of those pieces is obviously account management and a very stable and a very strong and a very experienced fleet team. But the other part of it is our competitive advantage versus a lot of the other manufacturers. And that is having 2,000 engineers out in the backyard, who developed Ranger who developed Everest.”
With only a limited range of vehicles to offer Fleet Managers, I asked Henderson about the product strategy and how they work with fleets that need passenger cars or medium SUVs.
“We’re not a full line, product portfolio, like some of the other competitors maybe,” explains Henderson. “We don’t shy away from that we’ve chosen to supply Australian customers with the product that we know will win in this space based on what we’re strong at in Australia and globally.”
“For almost all of our fleets, we are a multiple supplier. So we know that those fleets are sourcing Ford product, and they’re sourcing other products for different segments that we don’t support at this point. And we’re more than happy to work with our customers in those arrangements, and we see them working really well.”
“Where we are very strong, and where we think we have a clear competitive advantage is in the products that we obviously develop and can support here. And that’s why we see many customers source maybe passenger cars from somebody else, but continue to source Ranger, Everest, and Transit from us because they get that support. It’s obviously a class leading product with great residual values, but they get the support to be able to deliver a whole solution versus just a car.”
