Explore the forefront of automotive purchasing with "Indulge in the Future of Car Buying" — a captivating interview with Matt Chinn of Gubagoo, presented by DrivingSales. Dive deep into the transformative digital retailing solutions that are reshaping how dealerships interact with customers online and in-store. In this insightful conversation, discover how Gubagoo is leading the charge in integrating digital tools for a seamless car buying and selling experience, especially in the evolving landscape post-COVID.

What is the current dealership climate on digital retailing?

COVID sped everything up, kind of forecasted the direction that Gubagoo among many companies that offered digital retailing thought we were going anyway. Coming out of that we've seen a slower adoption. I think people are eager to do what they haven't been able to do and that is get into a store and test drive vehicle, kick the tires, so to speak.

There has been kind of a lull, but just taking the opportunity to take advantage of the entire car shopping experience. But for us, where that really comes in is kind of move in the direction of maybe the the need or desire that we thought was going to be there to buy a car exclusively online, that was required out of necessity from COVID, has been reduced a little bit and now the the real demand is for that blended buying experience so that online and in store to match and to be seamless. I think that's really the need for digital retailing is most important. 

The definition of digital retailing differs from customer to customer.

That's what we see it as moving more in that direction. I think you nailed it. I think the previous notion, especially from dealers, was that the customers are gonna want to buy A to Z online, and that might not be the case now. We had to go through the experience like we just talked about, but the the demand is still there that you need to be able to offer some sort of shopping experience online, even if it's not fully a buying experience online.

And it's really important so that all the work the consumer's done, when they show up, it matches 1 to 1. And it like I said, it just builds that blended experience and the numbers and the interactions that they have online matter. It's not just smokescreens of what you want them to think they're seeing., it actually is like that.

Where do you find dealers struggle with digital retailing consistency?

 Some of it is just capabilities, working with tools that don't speak well to each other. Maybe they have a website that comes with a digital retailing experience, but has no interactions or talking to their DMS or CRM. So in the inventory that they're looking for online maybe isn't updating as quickly. The numbers that they're seeing online aren't backed by actual lenders or the desking tool would desk a deal that's not going to match at all. I think for us, it's really just using such disjointed tools. 

You've got dealers who say, Yeah, I have a digital retailing tool, that's what customers demand, but then when they go instore or they try to back up and try to do the car buying process, as if they didn't do any of that work themselves. Those are the things that immediately fracture trust and hurt the consumer experience.

Lack of consistency is frustrating to the customer.

I think it's a kind of akin to the existence of DoorDash and Ubereats. If you're going online and you're like, "it makes it so simple, here's all the information, here's all the stuff I want", and I place the order and what shows up isn't what I ordered. I don't know if I'm calling DoorDash or I'm calling the restaurant. The restaurant doesn't have any record. They say that's DoorDash's fault. That's not my fault. And if that happens to the car process, you get there, these numbers that you talked about are fractured. It's going to lead to that same experience.

I hate to say it, but there are restaurants I don't frequent anymore because the online to physical interaction just didn't match and there wasn't any support or trust in those tools that I had. 

What are top dealers doing right?

I think you find this with any software application. It's the commitment to the tool that you're paying for and training and dedication from the staff. We have a chat platform that is all hands off if you want it to be, but where you really see the improvement is where they have the dedication of the staff and have people that are bought into the tool as well and are handling those conversations, moving people through the digital retailing process, moving them from a conversation, just a chat question out of the blue about inventory to okay, here's how you explore your payments, execute a credit app and things like that. 

I think when you have that commitment end to end it, you can really feel it. Whenever a customer arrives in store, they understand what you were talking about. We can pick up right on our iPad. We can jump right in. I think that and commitment to the applications and the software that you're purchasing, that's going to drive the difference. 

How does Gubagoo approach support?

There's onboard training. We want to make sure that people are in the store training people how to use these products.

I think the big differentiator for us is our client success team. You have someone you know tied to your account immediately right off the bat that is there to support you, is there to show you the different things you do to leverage and implement in the store, train you up on things and give you like real honest, conversational reporting when these things are happening to show how either your salesforce or your team is using the tools.

What is the best digital retailing structure?

I think the scale of dealerships you work with varies wildly, so I'm not going to say anything is like a one size fits all approach. I think anytime you are working within silos, that just creates the opportunity for communication breaks and gaps. I prefer if there's the opportunity to eliminate those silos that have everybody on the floor understand, whether your BDC, or maybe you have a chat team, or maybe it's just one Internet manager that's trying to facilitate all this, the people on the floor are aware of what's happening on the Internet side whether they're working those leads themselves or not. As long as the communication is consistent that if someone arrives into the store, everybody on that floor can understand how they may or may not have interacted with on your website.

I feel like that's a big miss a lot of times that your sales folks don't even understand what's possible on their website. They haven't got anything for themselves. They haven't gone through that digital retailing experience to see what a customer is going to see before they arrive at the dealership. I think going through that process one time and level setting for all the salespeople, they'll have a better understanding of what the expectation will be when the actual customer arrives.

So regardless of who's working the leads in the back end, I think that consistent communication and level setting is what's really going to drive success and make for a better customer experience when they arrive on a lot. 

What are some chat trends you are seeing?

I don't have the stats in front of me, I probably should, but a lot of these chats that we're handling and we manage, that we train our chat specialists to handle as well as the AI within the tool, is to handle these like concierge chats.

When I think of the fixed ops side, I think of that a lot. Our goal with sales is that we want to gather PII, we want to make these are actionable leads. We want to work them into digital retailing so that you're working a deal when you get that information not just chase down lead information. 

On the fixed side, it's a little more interesting because there's not that 1 to 1 as much. But if as we say, if our websites are truly extension of the showroom and extension of the dealership, when someone hops on, when they are chatting, they expect it to be someone in the dealership. That's where we use AI and our chat specialists really step up and if you want hours we know what they are and we respond immediately.

We have integrations that allow you to schedule your service appointment directly within the chat and have that turned around immediately. A lot of those concierge chats are the ones that really step up, and that's a huge bulk of what people expect when they land on a website. They interact with somebody and it's surprising how often those fall flat or require follow up when consumers today demand that 1 to 1 immediate answer. I feel like that's probably the biggest role that we play on a fixed side. 

What is your philosophy on AI in chat?

We believe our model is very much like Goldilocks terms. If you want to have the AI there to answer easy, simple questions that people want immediately and you want to be able to turn that around just to make sure that interaction was good and they got what they needed quickly and then our chat specialists are trained to jump in when those conversations get more complicated. Where does it make sense to start with PII, let's get this person working, here's a vehicle or two that they should be shopping and then they know to when to notify the dealership of when there's what we call like rescue opportunities for them to jump into chat themselves.

So we really believe in like that balance between artificial for immediacy, which people demand today and the human touch to make sure that they are getting where they need to go and we are supplying the best possible help lead to deal information to the dealership.

Redesigning chat interfaces.

 We've got this one example that seems so subtle, but it was pretty impactful for the dealers. Coming out of NADA a couple of months ago, we had a simple like an option for the dealer to have a redesigned chat interface. It's not the bubble that pops up, that just screens at you right when you're on the website, but it's one that's a little bit more subtle that people can react with. We're listening to dealers, giving them the tools that they're hearing from people that they want on their website and allowing them to customize these interfaces to be what they want.

Because every website is going to be different in terms of how much real estate they want covered by a chat agent, for example. So we listen, we react, we create different interfaces that they can choose from. But we also do want to be present and be there, so when people have questions, they know to come to us and have the answers immediately, that they will get their answers immediately. 

Consumers are more and more getting comfortable interacting with these chat agents, and they have a higher expectancy of getting the right answer. I remember when these things first popped out, it was so kind of like a it was a coin flip whether or not this was going to be a go, or do you just kind of like trained your brain to ignore it? But now more and more on it is like customer service. People are willing to engage the chat agents and actually get answers as opposed to here, we'll call you with answers.

That's what we train our chat specialists to do. 

How comfortable are consumers chatting with AI?

Candidly, the way that people are more and more comfortable, like interacting with your expectations, they are people who don't care. I think there's an expectation when you interact with somebody first on the website, you kind of expect this is the person that's going to facilitate, get my conversation to the right to the right person. So that's where AI comes in and answers all those like immediate question that is like that. You just want answers immediately. No person needs to hop on an answer that we know you're hours. You set those yourself, all that good stuff, and then a person can come in and take over and kind of pick up right where I left off. It's a very seamless interaction. But they're getting our chat specialist chat specifically for these chat conversations. And then when someone from the dealership comes out, we make it very clear like this is someone that's physically at the dealership, they're the person you're going to talk to you when you get there.

For the most part, when people hop on and handle chat, they're not concerned that they are talking with AI, what they're concerned about is the quality and the answer that they get. And that's where we try to put our focus. 

What does the future look like for Gubagoo?

For Gubagoo specifically, our focus has always been trying to create the best consumer experience and dealerships and providing their customers. What we've found is that people want immediacy. They want answers now. Down the line our focus is kind of going to be kind of like a CRM, and create a platform that allows for that immediacy, that messaging, and it gives dealers the opportunity to know where their prospect is online, and be able to reach out and engage in any step of their car-buying journey. Blending it so that you don't have your chat, the digital retailing, that goes from your digital retailing tool a prospecting that might not have any information on it. 

Our goal is to combine that all into one to make for that optimal consumer experience. It's just another opportunity for that disjointed experience that we talked about for online store. If you've got prospecting tools like CRM that aren't talking, that don't have any idea of what chat conversations you had or how far along they got in their digital retailing experience, where they're shopping for their own vehicle, where do they abandoned, then you're creating another disjointed experience where they're going to go jump on some prospecting schedule for internet leads. It's just going to seem like they don't know I that already picked my vehicle, that I'm just waiting on this credit application. Our goal is to create that kind of CRM that pulls that all together and create for that even more optimal consumer experience.

That's on the horizon out a ways. But I know that that's the kind of direction Gubagoo is thinking and wanting to go, essentially make sure that all those consumer interactions are together. 

A digital retailing customer is not a lead.

We really try to differentiate ourselves from a lead provider because this is all part of the consumer journey, really just maximizing and capitalizing on their intent and giving the dealerships the tools. 

If you're getting something from your digital retailing tool it shouldn't be seen as a lead, in my opinion. That's a partially worked deal. It's just picking up where you left off. It's engaging the customer, getting to the dealership, just finalizing some steps. That's my view of digital retailing, and we want to create a tool that is it providing lead information so a dealer doesn't have to chase down and see if this is a real email address or a real phone number.

We're creating a conversational experience with the customer that is working them down the funnel of this digital retailing experience where by the time they get to the dealership, they should know obviously all the PII information that normally lead would have. But we know it's good because they have shopping intent on the website, what vehicles they are interested in, what payments they want, maybe their exact credit score if they run the credit application. We know what their trade-in is. We know what lender and loan payment they picked. They're coming to you with that partially created deal. I view it all as a consumer experience and the digital retailing tool should signal some really strong intent for dealerships and it should equip them to be able to pick up right where that consumer left off.

And I think the CRM is the next iteration of that because we're just trying to identify every gap in that car buying journey and try to fill it with a tool that we think can talk to your other tools and create that better consumer experience.