How hard is it to be a user business? | automotive industry and economics

Written by | Wu Xue, Yu Jie

Produced | Automotive Sankei

A few years ago, a car company management asked Weilai about one thing: where did the gifts in NIO LIFE come from? Can you take us along? It is also right to take care of suppliers with a few more businesses.

Somewhat unexpectedly, Li Bin reluctantly declined: these things were designed by our own team and suppliers, and some of them also had DESIGN patents for NIO.

When Haidilao rose more than a decade ago, the catering industry set off a wave of "service-oriented" imitation. Many hot pot restaurants have begun to learn Haidilao to send "head ropes" to female customers (and now there are also).

Nowadays, Xuewei has become a user-oriented enterprise, which has become a major "political correctness" in the automotive circle.

"Others do not say, the Great Wall Old Wei is very important, specially organized the project team to study Weilai, but also dug Weilai's stores responsible."

A great wall Haval user operator told the auto industry and economic network: Weilai's user work is now indeed the object of learning and imitation by all car companies.

Even Li Bin himself has said that many companies are carrying out "pixel-level copy" on Wei.

In addition to imitating WEILAI's organizational structure to rename the marketing department as the user development department, or imitating the spatial layout of the cow house, the simpler operation is to directly recruit people from Weilai.

For example, in addition to the Great Wall, almost all new car brands have poached the heads of Weilai's directly operated stores.

Some people even joke that Weilai is the "Whampoa Military Academy" operated by users, exporting graduates and methodologies.

However, it is interesting that according to industry insiders, Zhao Yuhui, vice president of Extreme Kr Intelligent Technology, one of the recent graduates of the "Whampoa Military Academy", is a bit "under pressure".

NO.1

["I didn't expect it to be so difficult"]

Since its debut in April last year, Extreme Kr has determined the brand positioning of "main user co-creation" for itself, but the "magic" is that in the next operation, the user operation of Extreme Kr has repeatedly overturned.

From configuration changes and delayed deliveries to moldy mooncakes, the most recent user operation of Extreme Krypton was around the Spring Festival.

To describe it briefly:

Due to the decline of new energy vehicle subsidies in 2022, many manufacturers will issue preferential policies at the end of the year, so that users in 2022 can enjoy prices and rights that are basically equivalent to those in 2021. However, in the "outperform 2022" New Year rights and interests released by Extreme Kr, the policies and interests in 2022 are more preferential than at the end of 2021.

This operation is expected to anger the 2021 booking users. Some users even issued a joint statement requesting a refund of the deposit or an increase in compensation. In the Extreme Krypton APP community, some people even ridiculed Extreme Krypton as "Kryptonian". It means "buy early and lose early" like Tesla.

The above-mentioned extreme krypton insider said: Regarding this price deviation, it is true that the relevant personnel have some inattention. Without considering everything, the preferential policies were sent out hastily.

"However, the content of a poster is very limited and easy to misunderstand. Later, I explained it to the user in person, and I also understood. ”

The superposition of accidents after accident can't help but make people feel like a joke that the "user-type car company" mentioned by Ji Krypton is like a joke. Many people "attribute" this result to Zhao Yuhui, who was born in Weilai.

In 2017, Zhao Yuhui served as vice president of the user center at NIO, responsible for the expansion of NIO HOUSE, and his job responsibility was to maximize the interests of users through brand experience.

After three years at NIO, in March 2020, Zhao Yuhui was dug up to the Great Wall and served as the general manager of the user center of its sales company. There are rumors that the post was newly established by the Great Wall and only recruited people from Weilai.

However, Zhao Yuhui did not stay long in this seemingly "tailor-made" position. Only half a year later, in the media report, he left the Great Wall because of "water and soil dissatisfaction" and joined a real estate company.

Until April 2021, when Geely released Extreme Kr, Zhao Yuhui's title has become "Vice President of Extreme Kr Intelligent Technology", focusing on the various businesses of Extreme Kr and user docking.

A Kr employee told Sankei that although like other new car brands, Kr has also set up a user operation center and a user growth center. But in fact, its user operation function is infiltrated in each business line, and in each business line, a position related to user operation is set up.

The goal is to allow everyone to form an ideology of user service, rather than limiting this functionality to one or two departments.

This starting point does have a Weilai inner taste. However, judging from the current results, it is "very good to think, but it is difficult to implement." ”

As a kryptonian staff member privately sighed: "From the beginning, we have worked hard to be a user-oriented enterprise, working overtime, but now we feel that we are gradually drifting away from users." I didn't expect it to be so difficult to do user operations. ”

In addition to Extreme Kr, new brands of the "national team" such as Zhiji and Jihu have also turned over the "basic links" of user services to varying degrees.

For example, some users complained that they applied for a test drive on the official website of Jihu, and left their mobile phone number for three days and no one cared.

At the Guangzhou Auto Show at the end of last year, Zhao Zhinan, general manager of the national direct sales division of Jihu, once told Sankei Network: Jihu adopts the form of direct operation + dealership, some dealers are former dealers of BAIC, there is no experience in selling new energy vehicles, and there is indeed a gap in service compared with brands such as Weilai.

"We are also trying to recruit people from new forces such as Weilai, but this needs to be a process."

In short, through more than a year of user service "big test", there is no three-point image of Weilai, but there are many people who overturn the car in the first step.

NO.2

[Weilai, why can't you learn?] ]

Some insiders have revealed that the reason why Geely originally belonged to the Lynk & Co brand of Extreme Kr 001 model is independent of a new brand, the reason is that it "wants to raise funds through the IPO of this car".

This is also doomed, in order to complete Geely's "unfinished business" and born of the extreme Krypton, rather than long-term investment to establish a distinct brand image, more need is the rapid rise of sales.

Perhaps it is this eagerness that has laid the groundwork for its subsequent series of user operations.

For traditional car brands, with millions of customer bases, it is almost impossible to implement "Haidilao-style" services like Weilai.

Despite this, there are still enterprises "hard learning".

An APP operator of a joint venture car company once complained, "There are too many needs from internal leaders, and we are also very passive when we come up to recommend monetization." Coupled with the problem of the organizational structure of the joint venture, it is impossible to do this kind of No. 1 thing to the user (the leader personally goes down to communicate with the user). The number of users has been more than several million, and the education process from 0 to 1 is already a huge project. ”

For the matter of user operation, the relationship between the leadership and the executive layer is sometimes like "day without understanding the darkness of the night." ”

In addition, according to Sankei, in addition to Weilai, almost all car companies will cooperate with agencies to manage user services (such as 400 hotlines, etc.).

The view expressed by WEILAI is that "all the agencies operating agencies cannot meet the user service response speed that WEILAI needs." ”

So what is the fundamental crux of "Weilai you can't learn"?

"The biggest pain point of traditional car companies doing user operation is not the lack of people, nor the lack of speed of organizational structure change, but whether there is a determination to do user operation." The brand has just started to be established for half a year, a year can be, but two or three years in the field of user operation has not yet profit performance, from the leadership to the executive level of the pressure will be very large. ”

A senior user operator who has worked in traditional car companies for many years gave such a "summary of experience".

In his view, for traditional car companies and new brands established by traditional car companies, factors such as resource allocation and cost considerations have been incorporated into the development of enterprises at the beginning of the establishment of the brand. This is the most fundamental difference from Nio.

From Weilai founder Li Bin to president Qin Lihong, and vice president of user operations Wei Jian, a sentence that has been emphasized many times on different occasions is: In Weilai, user operation is the end, not the means.

The vast majority of car companies that say that they want to transform into user-oriented enterprises, once they set specific KPIs such as conversion rates and new numbers, it means that it is impossible to take user satisfaction as the ultimate goal like Weilai.

A user operation expert analyzed the more essential reasons behind this gap on Sankei.

He said, "Weilai is a company that loses a lot but has a high valuation, while the valuation of traditional auto companies is related to profits." So in essence, they are not a type of company, and the short- and medium-term goals they pursue are different. ”

Even for the new brands owned by traditional car companies, they have inherent labels that are difficult to eliminate from the beginning. This also means that the parent group and the outside world still demand them around the sales volume and profit of the product.

To put it bluntly, WEILAI is willing to continue to lose money in the matter of user service, which is premised on the premise that other brands born in traditional automobile groups are not allowed.

What's more, for new brands such as Extreme Krypton, Zhiji, and Extreme Fox, "once the pie of 'user-oriented' is drawn, it will be more difficult to turn back." ”

This may also be the reason why hundreds of hot pot restaurants closed under the tide of Haidilao.

NO.3

[User operation, the ephemeral of the times?] ]

In fact, even NIO itself is experiencing changes in user operations.

At the beginning of the establishment of Weilai, there were doubts that Weilai's user service is not long-term, and with the increase in the number of users, the concentration of Weilai's user service is bound to be continuously diluted.

Qin Lihong also said helplessly in an interview, "When Weilai has tens of thousands of employees, 30% of them are firm advocates and practitioners of values, which is very gratifying, and we hope that this proportion will stay a little longer at the stage of 60%. ”

He likens this to an "anti-aging" process. So the truth is, "aging" is inevitable.

With the exponential growth of the scale of users, the way WEIlai operates users has begun to show signs of "simple and efficient" problem solving from the original executives personally replying to users.

On this point, there are many "complaints" on the Weilai APP - the current Weilai everything is solved by simply sending points red envelopes.

"In the group of car friends, everyone often compares how many points red envelopes are received, and since judging the quality of FL (Fellow), the red envelope is a good FL, and the one who does not send a red envelope is a bad FL, and will be complained about."

"This is not a user enterprise, this is a giant baby user and lazy government point management, everything is solved with points, weilai's big evil disease!"

"Satisfaction stacked by points (too many problems solved by points) can't withstand the wind and rain, as long as the service is reduced, users will complain, and too many resources are needed to maintain this satisfaction."

A new car delivery employee of Weilai also told us that the solution to the problems encountered by many grassroots employees is to issue points.

In fact, according to Shen Hong, the head of user relations at Weilai, in a previous interview, their original concept was to learn from Haidilao and give full authorization to terminal service personnel.

"There are thousands of problems on the user side, and it is difficult to use a standardized management manual to stipulate from top to bottom how to do user services." Only now, issuing points seems to be becoming a "standardized" operation.

However, this may be the inevitable result of Weilai's user service.

The above-mentioned user operation expert told Sankei, "When the penetration rate of electric vehicles is getting higher and higher, in fact, it is slowly not necessary to have a particularly complex user operation." Weilai itself will slowly abandon complex user operations. ”

This truth is just like the 3C products of that year.

Just like at the beginning of the smartphone, Xiaomi also relied on community operation to accumulate the initial group of "enthusiasts". However, as enterprises gradually move towards large-scale development, when Xiaomi's shipments have ranked third in the world in 2021, up to 191 million units, the original complex user operation has long been gradually abandoned, and it is no longer the decisive force to push it forward.

As for the pixel-level imitation of the Weilai model by many car companies today, will it become a short-lived phenomenon in the era of electric vehicle transformation?