Mercedes Benz Vans - The Customer Experience - Vito Challenge

The Mercedes Vito Van was the focus for this year’s Customer Experience chosen by Mercedes Benz UK. What had previously been a driving event was determined this year to be more of a learning and development event. It has been a successful product in terms of its profile, performance and quality. What is not so easy to understand are the many different finance options that are available to sales staff and the relative benefits of the whole life cost, various service packages and need for customer retention. Using experiential, drama-based techniques, workshops were designed to be engaging, thought provoking, participative and have a concrete effect on the performance of sales staff.

During a week long series of workshops, PMT engaged every level of Sales staff throughout the UK region. The workshop was based on a life sized board game where delegates experienced a customer’s journey by passing through a number of zones.

Zone 1. Attendees arrived at the event and were met and greeted in a mocked up showroom where they were treated well or badly to reflect a possible good/bad customer scenario.
Zone 2. Forum theatre which safely allowed delegates to explore real situations without ever being singled out or put on the spot. All the scripts were taken from mystery shopper videos and real life situations were dealt with through drama exercises and scripted Forum theatre sessions
Zone 3. Customer connection workshops and lively learning sessions including exercises such as ‘C Squared’ which enabled people to ascertain whether they were motivated by connecting with people or conviction towards a sale.
Zone 4. What is good Customer Service? Delegates were encouraged to share their own experiences and to highlight what they believed to be and expected of excellent customer service.
Zone 5. The communication workshop. How do we appear to others? A physical exploration of all the skills required to improve one to one communication with customers and colleagues alike.

Purple Monster created a fun, engaging and fully interactive event. It proved to be an appropriate bridge between what had formerly been solely a driving event and a harder edged sales focused event in the future.
All staff surveyed agreed that they now had a better understanding of finance as a sales aid and would be happy to undertake further product training

www2.mercedes-benz.co.uk/content/unitedkingdom/mpc/mpc_unitedkingdom_website/en/home_mpc/vans