Quality Assurance
The quality of our products and services plays a crucial role in maintaining customer satisfaction across the world. Customers are particularly satisfied and loyal when their expectations of a product or service are met or even exceeded. Reliability, appeal and service determine quality as it is perceived by the customer throughout the entire product experience. Our objective is to surprise and excite our customers in all these areas and thus win them over with our outstanding quality. We continued to improve our high level of quality in 2014, thus contributing to growth and to increasing the value of the Volkswagen Group.
Volkswagen Group’s Quality Assurance consistently focuses on our customers’ wishes and integrates them into product requirements. It also ensures that the company, as the manufacturer, and its products comply with all legal requirements. It defines high quality targets and standards and monitors compliance with them. In addition, it identifies the cause of any faults and manages the process for removing them.
Focus on customer wishes
Volkswagen Group’s worldwide growth also presents additional challenges for quality assurance. For example, new vehicle projects in individual regions around the world are subject to the widest variety of customer desires. In light of this, identifying specific regional factors and prioritizing them is an important task so that they can then be reflected appropriately in new products and in the production of established vehicle models. Critical factors include the available fuel quality, road conditions, traffic density, country-specific usage patterns and not least local legislation. Outside of Europe, the main focus of Quality Assurance is on conditions in the BRIC markets.
We mainly use market studies and customer surveys to capture the wide variety of customer requirements.
Product and supplier quality
In the reporting period, the large number of product start-ups made high demands on Quality Assurance. We maintained the high quality of the previous years for the Group. Our suppliers also made important contributions to this. We expect sustainable practices from them as well as delivering the highest product quality and reliability of supply.
Innovative technologies that are installed in new vehicles must be established in the markets without any problems. This is why Quality Assurance follows and analyzes these vehicle projects long before customers experience a new product. The aim is to make the product even better and even more reliable, while at the same time successfully implementing as many customer wishes as possible in the new projects and continuing to factor in regional requirements and needs.
In 2014, we continued to standardize our fault removal process, which now enables us to react even faster and better to any vehicle problems – to the benefit of our customers. This increases customer satisfaction and at the same time reduces warranty and ex gratia repair costs for Volkswagen.
Service quality
We also aim to improve the quality of our service offerings worldwide. In 2014, we therefore further optimized the warranty and ex gratia repair instruments. As the direct interface with customers, the dealership operation offers additional starting points: we can identify at an early stage any problems that may be revealed in the emotional moment of vehicle handover and correct them systematically.