Unifying customer data to drive a new automotive experience
Porsche Holding connected CRM data with analytics to improve the customer experience
faster development using production-ready Lakeflow Connect instead of a homegrown solution
Porsche Holding Salzburg (Porsche) is Europe’s largest automotive retail company, operating in 23 countries throughout Europe as well as in Colombia, Chile, China, Malaysia, Singapore and Japan. They represent the Volkswagen Group brands in wholesale (as an importer), retail (through their dealers) and the after-sales business (service). The company also covers the entire spectrum of the automotive trade, including spare parts distribution, a full range of automobile financing services and in-house IT system development.
Since March 2011, Porsche has been a 100% subsidiary of Volkswagen AG, contributing decades of know-how in the automotive business to Volkswagen Group global sales. By the end of 2023, the company employed a workforce of 35,900 and had sold more than 747,700 new vehicles, generating a turnover of €29.4 billion.
However, fragmented data systems meant customer engagements remained siloed, limiting the company’s ability to connect them and deliver modern, personalized experiences. To transform how they engaged with customers while also enabling data-driven decision-making, Porsche turned to Lakeflow Connect and the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform.
Siloed systems limit a holistic view of customer insights
When customers interact with Porsche — from dealership visits and banking services to after-sales support — they generate millions of data points that hold the key to delivering personalized customer experiences and driving business growth.
In an automotive retail environment where exceptional service directly correlates with repeat purchases and brand loyalty, Porsche data analysts struggled to connect customer interaction data from Salesforce — including email engagement metrics, campaign responses and customer behavior patterns — to the wealth of information stored in their data lake. Marketing teams couldn’t easily access the data they needed to optimize campaigns and calculate ROI. Customer experience teams lacked the unified view necessary to deliver personalized recommendations for specific customer offers such as leasing renewals or maintenance services. “We have a lot of touchpoints and systems interacting with our customers,” Lucas Sulzberger, Project Manager at Porsche Holding, said. “It was pretty difficult to have all the important data that helps us create the perfect customer story in one place.”
The manual maintenance required for a custom solution would likely consume significant resources and make it challenging to scale efficiently. This would be especially problematic given the automotive industry’s rapid shift toward omnichannel retail, with most buyers now expecting seamless transitions between online research, virtual showrooms and in-person dealership experiences. The stakes were particularly high because research shows that vehicle buyers looking for premium or luxury brands spend significantly less time at dealerships than mass-market customers, making every interaction more crucial.
Porsche’s main priority was to establish a unified data infrastructure that would support the ability to scale while maintaining operational efficiency and implementing robust, sophisticated analytics. Specifically, the company wanted to eliminate data silos between their CRM and analytics environments, reduce the maintenance burden of custom integrations and enable more advanced use cases like predictive analytics and personalized marketing. Instead of having a custom or homegrown solution, they wanted a more scalable and sustainable platform that could handle complex data requirements.
Incremental data ingestion with Databricks Lakeflow Connect
To address their data goals, Porsche turned to Databricks Lakeflow Connect, which offers native data ingestion connectors for popular SaaS applications, databases and file sources for any practitioner wanting to build incremental data pipelines at scale. These built-in connectors provide efficient, end-to-end incremental ingestion and easy setup with a simple UI or API access. Fully integrated with the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform, Lakeflow Connect provides customers with the benefits of unified governance, powered by serverless compute. More broadly, Lakeflow Connect is part of Lakeflow, a new unified data engineering solution that spans ingestion, transformation and orchestration.
Porsche was interested in the Lakeflow Connect Salesforce connector to create unified access to their customer data and access Salesforce Sales Cloud directly from within their Databricks Platform. Lakeflow Connect offered a streamlined solution to the company’s data integration challenges — they were able to ingest data from Salesforce, transform it in batch and streaming modes, and deploy and operate in production.
In addition, Lakeflow Connect provided the needed flexibility to adjust data synchronization schedules based on business demands, which is a mission-critical feature for Porsche. Whether the data team wants daily updates, monthly updates or hourly synchronization, Lakeflow Connect can be fine-tuned to match specific use cases. “With Databricks, we get great flexibility with very low effort,” Markus Gruber, Principal Data Scientist at Porsche Holding, noted. “Basically, you just set the schedule and it’s done. That saved us a lot of money during implementation and also long term for maintenance.”
“Lakeflow Connect allows us to access all of our CRM data in near real-time — everything with sales and marketing touchpoints — and it’s easy to set up, efficient and flexible,” Lucas added.
Also, since Lakeflow Connect is a managed product with full observability, monitoring and governance, there’s no need to worry about ongoing maintenance. This is particularly helpful for Porsche and the broader automotive sector, where IT resources are increasingly focusing on innovation in emerging areas such as connected car technologies and digital retail experiences rather than allocating time to managing infrastructure.
The Databricks Data Intelligence Platform now forms the core of Porsche Holding’s data lake. Unity Catalog provides data governance and security, the ingestion pipeline works with Salesforce and Lakeflow Connect to ensure reliable synchronization of CRM data, and Workflows enables sophisticated job scheduling and notifications.
Transforming customer experience through unified data
The Databricks Data Intelligence Platform and Lakeflow Connect have transformed how Porsche manages and uses their customer data. By opting to use Lakeflow Connect instead of building a custom solution, the company has reaped the benefits of both operational efficiency and cost management.
Internally, teams at Porsche now spend less time managing data integration processes. “Lakeflow Connect has enabled our dedicated CRM and Data Science teams to be more productive as they can now focus on their core work to help innovate, instead of spending valuable time on the data ingestion integration with Salesforce,” Markus explained.
This shift in focus aligns with broader industry trends as automotive companies redirect significant portions of their IT budgets toward customer experience innovations and digital transformation initiatives.
From a business perspective, using this managed solution has helped decrease development time and effort and accelerate time to production, while the sustainable approach to data connectivity has minimized risks and costs. “Lakeflow Connect helps us close a critical gap for Porsche from the business side on ease of use and price,” Lucas said.
Perhaps most notably, the unified data infrastructure has enabled Porsche to reimagine their customer journey. Instead of fragmented interactions across different touchpoints, customers now experience a more coherent, personalized relationship with the brand. For example, customers can receive a personalized offer based on their previous interactions with Porsche. Lucas explained, “On the customer side, we’re able to create a completely new customer experience that strengthens the bond between Porsche and the customer with a unified customer journey.”
This transformation also aligns with Porsche’s broader strategic vision. “One of our goals is to become a more data-driven company,” Markus stated. “The Databricks Platform is one of the important components to help us get there.”