KIWI RIDER 04 2020 VOL1 | Page 30

SATISFACTION BEGINS Boris: You have been in Asia now since 2013, first with Piaggio in Jakarta, then in Vietnam, and then in India as Managing Director of Ducati there. Now you are in Australia. Do you have a special love affair with this part of the world? Sergi: Oh yes, definitely. Starting with my wife, who is Vietnamese. I met her in Hanoi. I started in 2010 in Vietnam with the Piaggio Group where we opened up the business unit for the Asia-Pacific region. And I have always been attracted by Asia, so I got the chance to go there and work as the business development manager, and travelled across a few of these countries. After that, we moved to Indonesia also with Piaggio, and then back to Vietnam in 2015. Then Ducati called me for an opportunity in India. I was a Ducati customer before that, and I saw it was a very good opportunity to work for a brand that I really loved. So we opened a subsidiary in India and it has been an incredible journey, the three years that I spent there. Boris: The Australian motorcycle market might be called challenging at the moment. What specific strategies do you have to sell motorcycles in that market? 30 KIWI RIDER Sergi: First of all, Australia and Ducati have a special link in terms of racing. Most of our champions are Australians, and we have a special love for the country. Besides this, the kind of bikes we sell in Australia are normally our top-end bikes, so the customers are very well educated on what they want and what they can take from our brand. With this move into Australia, we wanted to make sure we were closer to the customer; we wanted to shorten the communication between the brand and the customer. And I think this is very easy to do with a subsidiary which is fully owned by Ducati. I think it gives us the chance to really implement and take care of customer satisfaction which is one of the key things – we listen to what the customer wants, and at the same time we are able to implement any strategy that comes from the brand directly to the market. So, a faster response and with a cleaner mission, I would say. Boris: What changes to the dealer network can the customer expect under your management? Sergi: Customer satisfaction is key, how we do that is through focused investment in training. We want to make sure first that our dealers are