Autorola Group: The Customer Who Ended Up Buying Into SurveyGauge

"SurveyGauge has given us a common language for customer experience that extends from the individual employee all the way up to the board. It has changed the way we make decisions."

• Peter Grøftehauge, CEO & Owner, Autorola Group

The question that started it all

"Can you tell me whether our customers are satisfied?" When Peter Grøftehauge put that question to his leadership team, the answer was honest: not really. Not because Autorola Group's customers were unhappy - but because nobody had a systematic picture.

With 70,000 car dealers on the platform, three business units, and operations in 19 countries, customer feedback lived in individual conversations and spreadsheets. A country manager in Germany had his sense of things. A sales director in Brazil had hers. A unified picture didn't exist.

Autorola Group chose SurveyGauge as the partner for the programme. Where the collaboration ended up, we'll return to - because it became more than a renewed contract.

Autorola in brief

Autorola Group, founded in 1996 in Odense, Denmark, is critical infrastructure in global vehicle remarketing. Over 750 employees. 22 subsidiaries. Revenue exceeding DKK 1 billion with double-digit growth rates in recent years. Clients including BMW, Sixt, and Santander Banking.

The group operates three business units. Marketplace runs online auctions with 70,000+ car dealers from 31 countries. Indicata provides business intelligence analysing 15 million vehicles daily. Solutions offers software for fleet management, digital showrooms, and repair platforms.

A group of that size, growing at that pace, sets a high bar for its suppliers. That was the bar the programme was measured against.

Three units, three worlds

The first thing we discovered was that Indicata customers, Marketplace customers, and Solutions customers had fundamentally different expectations. Same group, three entirely different customer bases.

A car dealer buying vehicles on Marketplace thinks about speed, price, and delivery reliability. A fleet manager using the Solutions platform thinks about uptime, integration, and support. An Indicata customer - typically a leader making decisions about pricing and inventory - thinks about data quality and insight.

On top of that came 19 countries with different cultures, languages, and market conditions. A car dealer in Poland has different expectations than one in Australia. This isn't just a logistics challenge - it's a methodological one.

The board wanted one number. Reality demanded nuance.

What we built together

We designed three separate VoC flows - one per business unit - with shared KPIs at group level. NPS and CSAT are the same everywhere, while touchpoints, questions, and timing are tailored to each unit's customer journey.

Workshops that built culture We participated in Autorola Group's internal conferences, where employees from all countries gather. VoC wasn't presented as yet another IT project, but as a new way of running the business. That's an important distinction. You can roll out systems. Culture has to be built.

Leadership briefings in all 19 countries Every country manager receives ongoing CX briefings. Not just dashboards - but concrete recommendations. What's going well? What needs action? That ensures data isn't just collected but actually used.

Board-level reporting For the first time, Autorola Group's board had a consolidated view of customer experience across all three units and all countries. It changed the conversations in the boardroom. CX went from being "something customer service handles" to sitting on the agenda alongside finance and strategy.

Watch Autorola Group tell their story:

Results

• 3 business units with active, tailored VoC programmes
• 19 countries with ongoing CX briefings to leadership
• Board reporting - customer experience is now a standing item on the strategic agenda
• 70,000+ car dealers on the platform, all covered by systematic feedback
• Cross-unit benchmarking - for the first time, Autorola can compare customer satisfaction between units and countries

The result that never appeared in the reports

After roughly a year of collaboration, something happened that says more than any NPS chart: Peter Grøftehauge's holding company, PG Development, bought in as majority shareholder of SurveyGauge.

Autorola Group started as an ordinary customer. The programme delivered a unified CX picture across three units and 19 countries, briefings the country managers actually used, and a board that put customer experience on the strategic agenda. The owner's conclusion wasn't just to renew the agreement - it was to invest in the company behind it.

That is why Peter Grøftehauge is a co-owner of SurveyGauge today. The most demanding customer became the largest investor.

What we learned

If we were to do it again, we'd start with one business unit - probably Indicata - and scale from there. Rolling out to all three units across 19 countries simultaneously gave us breadth from day one, but it also meant the first months were more chaotic than necessary. A phased rollout would have given us better data to refine the model before scaling.

That's an honest assessment - and it applies to any global organisation: implementation is always more complex than you expect.

Key Figures:

• 3 business units with active VoC programmes
• 19 countries with ongoing CX briefings
• Board and executive management reporting
• Over 70,000 car dealers on the platform
• 750+ employees with access to CX insights
• After a year of collaboration, Autorola's owner bought into SurveyGauge