Volkswagen Group drives innovation with humans and AI agents, together.

Disconnected data across distribution levels made personalization at scale difficult.

“Purchasing a vehicle is an emotional experience. It’s not a once-in-a-lifetime thing, of course, but it impacts your family and has an effect on your personal life. It’s a big financial decision,” said Stefan Imme, Head of Group Sales IT. “That’s why we want customers in every brand to feel as comfortable and taken care of as possible while they make that decision.”

But decades of global growth also created complexity. Each brand developed its own customer systems, leaving teams with fragmented data and no shared view of the customer. A salesperson at a dealership, for example, might not know a returning customer’s vehicle history, website behavior, or service history. Without this in-depth context, it’s difficult to offer a personalized sales experience.

Service advisors might face similar challenges. Without a unified view of the customer and their vehicle data, even simple service inquiries could become time-consuming. Manually searching for vehicle details and relevant knowledge articles slows staff, leading to longer calls and extended waiting time for customers. 

“Ultimately, our brand reputation is at risk if we don’t address the marketing, sales, and service experience,” said Imme. “If we don’t meet customer expectations, people might turn away from our brands and buy different products.” 

With a strong foundation of product innovation and a deep commitment to customer satisfaction, Volkswagen Group is now focused on its next major transformation: delivering seamless, personalized experiences consistently — for Volkswagen, Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles, Audi, SEAT/CUPRA, ŠKODA, and their customer touchpoints.

Volkswagen Group creates a 360-degree customer view with the Salesforce Platform.

To deliver standout customer experiences across every distribution level — manufacturers, importers, and retail — Volkswagen Group created a unified CRM approach with the Salesforce Platform. By implementing Salesforce solutions such as Marketing Cloud, Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Data Cloud, Tableau➚, and MuleSoft➚, they provide one standard tech stack for several of their brands including Audi, Volkswagen, Volkswagen Commercial Vehicles, SEAT/CUPRA, and ŠKODA. This provides maximum flexibility to brands for their individual voice to the customer from marketing to sales and service while enabling cross-brand collaboration and integration of previously siloed data.

“Our aim is to be there for the customer along the whole customer journey,” said Stefanie Paetow, Business Owner of Salesforce ONE.CRM & Customer Care. “We strive to make every interaction as personal and as meaningful as we can.”

If a buyer explores vehicles online, Marketing Cloud will eventually be able to track that activity and engage with the buyer in real time. For example, time spent on a specific vehicle’s features could trigger a targeted pop-up, a test drive offer, or a promotional email — all based on their behavior. If they request more information or configure a vehicle, Sales Cloud will support structured lead handoff from first click to test drive or tailored offer.

After the sale, Service Cloud ensures that these connected experiences continue after customers have driven their new vehicles off the lot. If a customer calls with a question about their touchscreen, the rep knows the vehicle model, purchase date, and any past service — speeding up case resolution by 30%. “Service Cloud supports customer care agents with a unified view of each customer’s history and vehicle information, helping reduce friction and improve case resolution,” said Paetow. “Volkswagen Group has already seen significant improvements in service efficiency, as reps finally have all relevant data in one place.”

Volkswagen Group’s simplified implementation process — known internally as their ONE.CRM & Customer Care initiative — significantly sped up rollout to importers.

“Salesforce gave us the push. Faster to market. We managed to roll out 10 European markets within two years,” said Paetow. “By now, we have 52 countries on retail level for aftersales. We brought together various brands and strengthened their collaboration with each other.”

Volkswagen Group enables data-driven personalization with Data Cloud.

After standardizing their CRM, Volkswagen Group knew the next step toward creating personalized customer experiences was to get their data out of siloes with Data Cloud.

To create seamless experiences, Volkswagen Group is implementing Data Cloud to establish a unified Customer-360 profile. This profile will bring together customer and vehicle data from across siloed legacy systems, manufacturers, importers, dealers, and regional Salesforce instances — spanning marketing, sales, and after-sales operations — all in compliance with legal regulations.

Data Cloud will connect these disparate systems and harmonize the data into a single platform to create one unified 360° view of the customer using existing investments like API integrations and data lakes, and native connectors for partners such as AWS. It will integrate both structured and unstructured data and unify it with information from vehicle and customer databases. Even though much of this data is spread across disconnected systems and platforms, Data Cloud will make it usable in real time — without copying or moving it — thanks to its zero-copy architecture.

“The moment we realized Data Cloud’s impact is when we saw how it will pay off the investments we’ve already made in data storage and other pieces of Salesforce technology,” said Imme.

Having their data unified and accessible will make it possible for Volkswagen Group’s brands to provide the kinds of experiences their customers expect and lays the groundwork for the next step in their transformation: intelligent automation with Agentforce.

With a unified platform, Volkswagen Group envisions hyperpersonalized experiences at scale with Agentforce.

The next chapter of Volkswagen Group’s transformation will be powered by Agentforce — the agentic layer of the Salesforce Platform. By acting on near-real time data from Data Cloud, Volkswagen Group aims to have Agentforce personalize interactions along the whole customer journey and handle common tasks quickly. Whether it’s answering FAQs, simplifying search on websites, guiding customers through car configuration, or helping customers book a test drive, Agentforce will be there for customers 24/7.

Volkswagen Group plans to use Agentforce to streamline service in a variety of situations. For example, if an issue requires human assistance, like a warranty inquiry, Agentforce could pass the case to a support rep with a conversation summary so the rep can continue the customer's service experience faster and with the full context. And in the future, Agentforce will help dealership repair technicians prep for appointments by summarizing vehicle issues and vehicle data — making visits faster and smoother for both customers and employees.

“We aim to empower our employees to focus on delivering premium, direct customer experiences,” said Paetow. “This can be achieved by leveraging Agentforce AI, which potentially deploys proactive, autonomous agents to handle routine and operational tasks.”

Volkswagen Group’s vision for Agentforce extends beyond service. In sales, Agentforce could automatically route qualified leads, schedule test drives, or coach reps in real time. Sales reps could also use Agentforce internally to instantly surface a customer’s preferences or get suggestions for vehicle configurations that match what a customer is looking for.

With Agentforce, Volkswagen Group will turn their foundation of unified data into smarter, faster, more personalized experiences that deliver the same precision and innovation customers expect from the vehicles they drive.

“Our future vision is to use Agentforce to have personalization on every touchpoint at the right time, with the right message,” said Paetow.

“Salesforce as a platform connects our silos,” said Imme. “It helps us connect marketing, sales, and service and helps us bring solutions quickly to our customers, service representatives, and salespeople.” An integrated CRM platform like Salesforce provides a 360-degree view of the customer and their vehicle, enabling the orchestration of every automotive journey. This is exactly why Volkswagen Group chose Salesforce.

Salesforce gives Volkswagen Group the speed to build and launch new solutions quickly. The Salesforce Platform delivers a truly unified, shared view of the customer across distribution levels and is the only solution that can harmonize all the data from their first-party systems, third-party tools, and Salesforce itself. 

And because Agentforce is deeply integrated with the Salesforce Platform, Volkswagen Group will be able to turn their unified data into real-time, hyperpersonalized support — delivered autonomously, at scale. Agentforce will be fast to launch, built with low-code tools and out-of-the-box actions, and flexible to fine-tune and customize as customer needs evolve. Autonomous agents will plug directly into existing Salesforce workflows, ensuring smooth handoffs to human reps when needed and complete visibility into every interaction.

And while Agentforce will deliver intelligence and automation, it’ll also bring built-in guardrails to protect customer data. The Einstein Trust Layer masks sensitive data and ensures none of the data used for each query is retained, while sharing rules and permissions will help deliver the data governance required for Volkswagen Group’s international scale. 

With Agentforce, Volkswagen Group is ready to create a future where every touchpoint is smarter, more efficient, and perfectly tailored to meet the needs of every driver, every time.