Audi Volkswagen Middle East Improves After-Sales Retention Using Amazon SageMaker

Audi Volkswagen Middle East (AVME) improved its after-sales retention and loyalty using a machine learning (ML) solution built on Amazon Web Services (AWS). AVME is one of the world’s largest automotive manufacturers by sales and serves customers across the Middle East. The company wanted to improve its customer experience and unlock insights from historical vehicle data while improving after-sales retention. AVME engaged Inawisdom, an AWS Partner, to build a predictive after-sales ML model using Amazon SageMaker and Amazon Redshift. AVME has improved after-sales retention, improved its customer experience, and increased sales revenue.

AVME is based in Dubai and is part of the Volkswagen Group. The company is one of the world’s leading automobile manufacturers by sales and serves markets across the Middle East.

“Initially, AVME engaged AWS in 2019 for a data lake and data warehouse project,” says Saif Khan, digital transformation senior manager at AVME. “The success of this project as well as the relationship and level of service received from AWS led us to investigate how we could use AWS to further develop our After Sales business. AWS is now AVME’s preferred choice for all future cloud initiatives, and it has been a pleasure to see this collaboration grow over the years to now include further models and projects with the help of Inawisdom.”

AVME wanted to use its historical data, being held in its data lake on AWS, and customer behavioral patterns to unlock insights and improve its after-sales retention and loyalty. The company also wanted to improve its customer experience and generate additional turnover.

The AWS team told AVME about Inawisdom. Inawisdom is an AWS Partner, helping data-rich businesses discover valuable insights using data-driven decision-making, artificial intelligence, and ML. Furthermore, Inawisdom was AWS ML Partner of the Year in 2020.

AVME decided to engage Inawisdom to deliver predictive marketing for after-sales activities using Amazon SageMaker, which is used to build, train, and deploy ML models for any use case with fully managed infrastructure, tools, and workflows. This predictive after-sales model generated predictions regarding future vehicle service types and relevant parts using AVME’s historical vehicle service datasets from dealers across the Middle East.

Inawisdom quickly built a secure analytics solution on AWS to ingest the large amount of historical data on vehicle use, service history, parts, brake data, mileage, and labor from AVME’s data lake. Inawisdom trained ML models to compensate for impacts from the COVID-19 pandemic, building algorithms to accurately predict the wear of parts based on the data.

The solution deployed by Inawisdom for AVME was the Rapid Analytics and ML solution built on Amazon SageMaker and Amazon Redshift, which uses SQL to analyze structured and semistructured data across data warehouses, operational databases, and data lakes, using AWS-designed hardware and ML to deliver the best price performance at any scale. The solution also included an A/B testing strategy to determine how effective marketing predictions were and incorporate customer responses back into the ML models for further improvement.

Inawisdom provided a solution for AVME that was designed to be scalable and continually optimize predictions based on new data for customers. The trained ML models had 80 percent accuracy, the intelligent algorithms could compensate for variations to data due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the solution calculates customer behavioral patterns for upsell potential, price sensitivity, and loyalty.

“Inawisdom understood our goals and customer-centric strategy and then used the data we already held to rapidly turn it into true business value,” says Khan. “It’s been a successful collaboration proving the real power of ML, and one we hope to continue with further use cases.”

Using the solution built on AWS, AVME improved its analytics and its customer experience. AVME can now run data-driven marketing campaigns, which send the right message at the right time to its customers, leading to improved customer experience and engagement.

Using predictive analytics, the company can offer more proactive service for customers and their vehicles. The new solution has led to a positive impact on the business’s bottom line due to increased sales revenue and improved after-sales retention and loyalty. Using Inawisdom and AWS, AVME could contact 15,000 new and lapsed customers and saw a conversion rate of 12 percent. This led to a significant revenue increase.

AVME has improved its customer experience using the solution built on AWS by offering personalized customer service. The solution was initially deployed across four territories, and AVME plans to deploy across another 11 territories in the future. The company was satisfied with the experience of using AWS and working with Inawisdom and plans to continue using both in the future.

“Inawisdom is a fantastic partner,” says Khan. “With Inawisdom’s depth of knowledge of AWS and its expertise in artificial intelligence and ML, AVME has significantly enhanced our customer understanding and improved our retention and after-sales process.”