Automotive Steel Customer’s Journey

Digitization is spreading through the world with an ever-increasing speed, changing the way we do our day-to-day tasks and creating new opportunities for businesses. E-commerce showed us that selling anything is possible online and steel companies like ArcelorMittal have realized it with successful implementation for automotive steel customers.

Based on primary research and personal interviews of various automotive steel customers, I was able to plot the steps and stages involved in the journey of a B2B customer. There are differences between E-commerce and selling steel online due to the products, quantity and strategies involved. Purchase of products by B2B customer involves decision making at various levels and stages and they can be divided into 7 stages:

Automotive Steel Customer’s Journey, Source: Original

1. Awareness Stage: This is where it all begins. R&D team of customer conducts meetings with sales team, design team and with the steel manufacturers. Designing a new car involves research of new grades and quality, customer likes and dislikes, improvements in past models, competitor analysis. In this stage, the customer gains awareness of the products that any steel company is offering, new technology that could potentially benefit them in coming up with a better product.
2. Information Searching Stage: Being the second stage it is close to the awareness stage and often one gets confused on how it is different. When a customer enters this stage, he is already well informed of the technology and products that a particular company offers and they are interested in finding out whether a company can make what they need for them. They send the bill of materials to the steel manufacturer and the manufacturer sends back an analysis report about all grades of steel that they coul make for customers with the properties and time requirements.
3. Supplier Shortlisting Stage: After having many long internal meetings and weighing all the products suited for the needs, Car makers ask for the trial materials and conduct tests by making parts for their upcoming new model. The grades that pass testing gets shortlisted for manufacturing and price negotiation stage comes into the picture.
4. Quotes, Pricing & Negotiation Stage: There is a constant battle of cutting costs and delivering the best product. Price negotiation is an inherent part of steel procurement as well. Steel mills send their quotations and customers negotiate with the suppliers to come on an even ground which benefits both.
5. Ordering Stage: After all the designing, planning, meetings and more meetings and probably more meetings, customer finalizes their supplier and ordering process begins. Here customer sends the order together with the production schedule and then the order gets processed by the steel manufacturer. Customer keeps a track of their order as it undergoes processing in the mills and then if required when it is being processed by steel processing centres.
6. Delivery Stage: Steel orders get delivered to the customer during which time the customer keeps track of the status of shipments.
7. Post Sales Stage: In day to day operations there are times when there are quality issues which Car manufacturer might have to report. For these matters, they file a complaint with the steelmakers and then an assigned person visits the carmaker to create an analysis report on the situation. If required mills test the sample of the defected material and generate a comprehensive report which is critical for car company in deciding whether to call the cars back from the market.

Customer touch-points

After all this analysis of customer journey, the next thing I did was to map these onto a matrix with the digital technologies that are being used in all these different stages in India.

Automotive Steel Customer’s Journey Touch-points, Source: Original

After conducting long personal interviews of various employees at various levels in Car manufacturing companies and strategic steel procurement divisions what I understood is that there is a lot of scope for digitization. A customer had been highly dependent on phone calls to get the information that they need. This might sound easy but imagine calling your contact person for some information regarding the status of your product and then the contact person will call the concerned person and then he will call you back. That is when everything happens smoothly. But we all know how cumbersome it can be to attend so many calls in one day. Right now there is heavy dependence on phone calls, physical visits and emails to carry out the functions that are involved in various stages of the customer journey.

Product catalogues which serve as the basic source of information are still either in the form of difficult to search PDF files or bulky printed copies. If there are any digital catalogues they are the ones made my customer themselves over the years of dealing with Steel Manufacturers. ArcelorMittal is an exception and market transformer in this space and there is a separate analysis report where I wrote about ‘How ArcelorMittal transformed B2B customer journey in Automotive Space’.

This analysis helped me understand that digital journey for the customer is still not present in steel procurement. Supply chain problems and inefficiencies can be solved with digital solutions and it benefits all in the long run. Customers stay more satisfied with a better flow of information and steel manufacturers can have better time counting money than counting complaint forms.

Moreover, the customer wants digital solutions now more than ever and if steel manufacturers will fail to satisfy this demand of customers who are digitally pampered in their day to day lives then their competitor will.

Read More:

How ArcelorMittal transformed B2B customer journey in Automotive Space.