(upbeat music)
- Jaime and Madalena, thank you so much for being here
and joining me today.
It was amazing to see the Lynk & Co demo
as part of the business applications launch event.
I understand, as a company,
you are turning the automotive industry on its head.
Can you share a little bit about Lynk & Co
and your unique business model?
- We are super excited to be here, Emily,
so thank you for having us.
And let me start saying
that we are not a traditional car company.
We do make our cars, true, and it's a great one, by the way,
but we are in a mission to change mobility forever.
We like to keep things simple,
so you can just go to our website, you subscribe,
you get our car full of features,
you can share the car with you, your family, your friends,
and yes, we take care of all the boring stuff for you.
So no worries about insurance, maintenance, we take care.
- Yes, and in fact we are just getting started.
We only have 11 clubs across Europe
and we are at Barcelona Club right now.
These are the physical locations of Lynk & Co
to create brand awareness, to launch events,
for members to meet other members.
It's not a sales location.
You can just come here, relax, explore the car.
We have a lot of weird meeting rooms
and bathrooms to show you
a lot of the Lynk & Co experience.
- Wow, your mission of changing mobility forever
and your attention to these little details
is really inspiring.
I understand you're using both Dynamics 365
and the Power Platform and I'm curious how these products
have helped the company to give you a unique advantage,
enabling personalized customer experience.
- We look at Power Platform and Microsoft Dynamics
as a set of tools that help us
with the entire customer journey.
So not only that, but to secure
that we have a centralized customer data,
that we have no silos in between.
From Microsoft Dynamics, we see areas that can get help from
like customer service, marketing, sales, customer insights
and we look at Power Platform more
for the customer facing tools as for example the apps
that our customer, employees
take advantage on a daily basis.
- One of the things you say that really resonates with me
is this idea of enabling customer interactions
across multiple channels and also building this bridge
between the physical world and the digital world.
So how have you been able to build that bridge
using Dynamics 365 as well as Power Platform?
- That's a very good question
and in fact as I mentioned before,
Lynk & Co is mainly digital
but we do have our clubs
and in those locations we take advantage of power ups
to support our club crew on car deliveries, test drives
and even registering information about the customer.
For example, we could have a walk-in customer
ordering a tea, water or a cappuccino with oat milk.
We register and keep it on the customer profile
and if the customer comes back for a test drive
or car delivery, we would offer the same drink
or even suggest something else.
- All right.
Speaking of data, I wanna pivot a bit
to talk about the future.
There has been a lot of talk about the next generation AI
and the role it's going to play
in further personalizing customer experience
as well as improving employees productivity.
I'm curious what you think about the role AI will play
in delivering customer experience
and also employee experience.
- So many things that look like science fiction
for the last few years, all of a sudden makes available
for us to use on a daily basis in a very easy way.
So in the CP team, we are very looking forward
to take advantage of several functionalities
but I can pinpoint one or two.
Let's start with, imagine a chat bot that have access
to all Lynk & Co information
and can interact with our customers
using our own tone of voice.
How amazing that would be.
Second, what about if we allow our content creators
to focus on new innovative ideas
and creating value on the customer experience?
We could use AI to take care of all the bureaucratic things
like for example creating templates
or using for different markets.
- I think it would also help a lot our B2B sales managers
by suggesting their next actions
and also handling the bureaucratic tasks
as Jaime referred like writing emails
and let them focus what they should focus the most.
- Yeah, I think you just articulated the value of AI
is really about better productivity,
as well as having more time
to focus on personalizing your customer experience.
One thing that really impressed me when I read your story
is you went from a startup to a multi-country operation
in just a couple of years with a small team,
but you upheld your quality bar.
So, how have you seen success with the approach you've taken
and if other companies are going through the same journey,
what advice would you give them?
- I would summarize it in two topics.
First and for me the most important,
have a great team with you that allows you
to focus on the things you really want to focus.
They understand the priorities, the customer experience
and they have a great team spirit for us to make it there.
Second, we have a set of tools
that allow you to not reinvent the wheel.
So take advantage of the out of the box functionalities
and put all your energy on innovative and really cool ideas
that allows and makes a difference on our customer journey.
- You've obviously done a great job in leveraging technology
to advance your course in focusing on customers.
If there's one recommendation or piece of wisdom
you would share with other companies
who are going through the same journey in using data and AI
to personalize their customer experience,
what would you say?
- Well, I would say
from a customer engagement platform perspective,
that's delivering the best and possible customer experience
should be the focus.
And by that, I mean that customers demand an expectation
for a good experience its growing
and I would say as the speed of technology is transforming.
- Indeed, I can just add that, secure the basics.
Make sure that you have quality data in place,
easy to access to all tools, and with that,
the new functionalities that are being made available
will be easy to implement and yeah,
hopefully then our customer expectations will be met.
- Yeah, you are totally right.
Customers expectation always evolves,
but the way we deliver to their expectation changes
with technology.
So the mission for Microsoft
is really to be that innovator in technology
so our customers can focus
on transforming customer experiences.
I really wanna thank you for your time.
You shared a lot of insights and wisdom
that other companies can benefit
and I personally can't wait to check out your club next time
I'm in Barcelona or anywhere else in Europe
and I'm truly looking forward
to partner with you to do even more amazing things
on your journey for customer experience.
- Thank you so much, Emily.
- Thank you. - Looking forward
to see you here.
- Thank you for having us.
- Bye bye
- Thank you.