With the new year comes a new crop of exciting automobile dealership technologies. These software solutions are sure to bring your dealership on par with the Jetsons in 2018 - minus the flying cars. Consider face to face sales from your basement recliner, customers purchasing a car from their kitchen table, consolidating all your cluttered leads into one system, and even showcasing your showroom floor in the virtual world. Every new year brings new exciting opportunities to push your dealership to the next level, will you make 2018 the year you finally flush out your CX?

1 - Chat gives way to CX

Over the last few years, Dealerships have benefited greatly from website chat in response to the car buyer moving online. However, it is now almost universally implemented, and no longer provides differentiation, nor even fully lives up to what the online buyer expects today. Dealerships must adopt a “Customer Experience” mindset – mapping the experience across the entire buying process, and implementing technologies that seamlessly lead the customer through successive stages. This has multiple components – engaging the online buyer through the decision phase, ensuring a seamless experience across devices, getting sales reps in front of the customer as soon as possible, and leading them through to sales closure, and beyond.

Our uShare.to for Dealerships focuses on this specific problem, offering multiple communication channels to engage prospects online (video, audio, chat, mobile messaging), lead them through the sale to contracting, and enabling services beyond the sale – all in a single CX environment.

2 – Electronic Payment Options

Like it or not, paper is slowly becoming an archaic sales medium, offering more inconvenience and fewer benefits than electronic payment as financial software options continue to improve. With much of the sales process already taking place online, contract closure and financial arrangements now too are shifting to the digital side. eSignature for example, allows customers to instantly clinch the contract, rather than going through cumbersome paperwork. Online transactions are heavily protected through encryption, which in abstraction prevents anyone from stealing your personal information, and we continue to see a steady improvement in security measures. The Ovum Global Payments Insight Survey of 2017, in conjunction with ACI Worldwide, found online payment systems have continued to grow in the global market, with now over 80% of organizations citing online payment integration as a major benefit to their organization.

3 – Big Data and the Weight of the Internet

You know more about your customers than any previous generation of business. The International Data Corporation predicts that in less than a decade there will be 163 zettabytes of data available, that’s the capacity of more than one hundred BILLION of your 1TB hard drives, nearly 50 hard drives per person on earth. If you estimate there are ten billion electrons in fifty kilobytes, 2e20 kilobytes in 200 zettabytes, and each electron weighs about 1e-30kg, the weight of just the ones and zeros of all that data would be about 0.05 kg (Cass). Those are some heavy ones. We have all this data, what can we do with it? Predictive analytics allow you to target specific customers with cars they are likely to prefer, these targeted customers are more likely to convert leads than generalized campaigns, showing an over 100% lift over the non-targeted ads according to a Toyota marketing study. Big data goes beyond lead acquisition, following through the purchasing habits of your customers allows you to better target them for after sales service and future purchases.

4 – Online Showroom Floors

One of the rising technologies that has yet to be widely implemented, but continues to develop in the wake of recent social and entertainment technological leaps is the virtual showroom. A promising technology of the future, online showroom floors are beginning to crop up in dealership sites. With the social boom of virtual reality games in the past few months (VR Chat the lead offender) virtual reality is finally making its break into the general market. As aspects such as customer support and follow up move to video, even the showroom is dissecting into ones and zeros. A study by the research and consulting firm Frost & Sullivan found traditional dealers will be restructured, with central hubs in dense population centers showcasing an entirely digital showroom. This hub location will then direct the incoming leads to outer stores, storing inventory outside of the heart of the cities while attracting the heart of the consumer traffic (Frost). The transition won’t be all at once, and don’t expect to see many VR showrooms in 2018, but the first footholds of this exciting technological market are beginning to pop up, and if the excitement surrounding virtual reality continues to build in 2018, online showrooms may be in the more near future than you think.

References

Cass                     http://discovermagazine.com/2007/jun/how-much-does-the-internet-weigh

Bedgood              http://www.relevateauto.com/data-driven-automotive-marketing-local-                                                dealerships/

Frost                     http://www.frost.com/prod/servlet/press-release.pag?docid=288841360

Ovum                    https://www.aciworldwide.com/-/media/files/collateral/trends/2017-global-                                       payments-insight-survey-overview.pdf