At NDMC we've been busy over the past 6-months developing a new Marketing Portal on the Encanvas platform to overcome the many and varied issues facing motor dealerships.

Thanks to Encanvas, we're able to bring new software applications to-market without coding. This doesn't overcome the bigger challenge of making sure the applications we produce 'fit' the processes and user expectations, but it does at least mean that we can afford to make mistakes - an inevitable consequence of bleeding edge development.

Much of the development work we've undertaken over the last few months has involved working with major dealer groups in the UK to actually establish 'what's not working' and then chasing our tails behind the scenes to overcome the issues.

So what have we found?

The top 5 weak-points are:

1. The way data is held in a dealership (even when in a single DMS) creates a fragmented view of customer data.
2. No central campaign management approach risks under-marketing/over-marketing. 
3. DMS systems have no means of managing 'relative dates'. This means when a reminder flag has past, the opportunity is lost forever. Furthermore, there exists no mechanism to 'optimise' how leads are progressed and load-balanced to sales and marketing people (and systems) resulting in 'always poor' data.
4. There exist no effective tools for automating the harvesting of data from third party systems, quarantining and cleansing data resulting in ‘always poor’ data. In consequence senior sales and marketing managers spend far too much time crunching data to produce campaign lists. 
5. Executive managers have no means of real-time enquiry into their customer data. This means reports have to be created to answer any idea or questions.

​Okay - great. So lots of challenges. How do you solve them?  Well there are many ways to skin a cat.  In our case we've solved the problem for our clients by creating a marketing portal that does the following things:

Solution 1: Aggregation and cleansing of data.  We've created a 'data engine' that automates the harvesting and cleansing of data. It automates much of the ugly work of treating poor quality data.

Solution 2. We've created a campaign management platform that supports relative dates together with the ability to store queries.

Solution 3. We needed to help dealers to maintain their data quality so we created a system that formalizes their internal process of managing data quality (by identifying poor quality data through searches and then generating task lists to have the data cleansed).

Solution 4. We wanted to provide execs with tools to ask questions of their data.  Presently they come up with questions in their mind and then have to produce reports to source data to see if they're right or not.  You can imagine how wasetful this process is!! The solution we came up with is a CRM Diagnostic portal that includes interactive charts, grouped tables and maps to really make the customer data accessible.

But have we reached an end-point?  I think not.  So far my impression is that we've managed to solve OBVIOUS problems that most dealerships should be able to do in this day and age with all of the available technology that surrounds us.  They may be obvious but they're definitely not easy issues to solve. One of the reasons for this lies in the complexity of the data environment and the sub-optimal quality of software tools in the sector (though this may be a 'UK' issue rather than a global one;-).

If you have had similar experiences I welcome the opportunity to learn of them.

Ian.

At NDMC we've been busy over the past 6-months developing a new Marketing Portal on the Encanvas platform to overcome the many and varied issues facing motor dealerships.

Thanks to Encanvas, we're able to bring new software applications to-market without coding. This doesn't overcome the bigger challenge of making sure the applications we produce 'fit' the processes and user expectations, but it does at least mean that we can afford to make mistakes - an inevitable consequence of bleeding edge development.

Much of the development work we've undertaken over the last few months has involved working with major dealer groups in the UK to actually establish 'what's not working' and then chasing our tails behind the scenes to overcome the issues.

So what have we found?

The top 5 weak-points are:

1. The way data is held in a dealership (even when in a single DMS) creates a fragmented view of customer data.
2. No central campaign management approach risks under-marketing/over-marketing. 
3. DMS systems have no means of managing 'relative dates'. This means when a reminder flag has past, the opportunity is lost forever. Furthermore, there exists no mechanism to 'optimise' how leads are progressed and load-balanced to sales and marketing people (and systems) resulting in 'always poor' data.
4. There exist no effective tools for automating the harvesting of data from third party systems, quarantining and cleansing data resulting in ‘always poor’ data. In consequence senior sales and marketing managers spend far too much time crunching data to produce campaign lists. 
5. Executive managers have no means of real-time enquiry into their customer data. This means reports have to be created to answer any idea or questions.

​Okay - great. So lots of challenges. How do you solve them?  Well there are many ways to skin a cat.  In our case we've solved the problem for our clients by creating a marketing portal that does the following things:

Solution 1: Aggregation and cleansing of data.  We've created a 'data engine' that automates the harvesting and cleansing of data. It automates much of the ugly work of treating poor quality data.

Solution 2. We've created a campaign management platform that supports relative dates together with the ability to store queries.

Solution 3. We needed to help dealers to maintain their data quality so we created a system that formalizes their internal process of managing data quality (by identifying poor quality data through searches and then generating task lists to have the data cleansed).

Solution 4. We wanted to provide execs with tools to ask questions of their data.  Presently they come up with questions in their mind and then have to produce reports to source data to see if they're right or not.  You can imagine how wasetful this process is!! The solution we came up with is a CRM Diagnostic portal that includes interactive charts, grouped tables and maps to really make the customer data accessible.

But have we reached an end-point?  I think not.  So far my impression is that we've managed to solve OBVIOUS problems that most dealerships should be able to do in this day and age with all of the available technology that surrounds us.  They may be obvious but they're definitely not easy issues to solve. One of the reasons for this lies in the complexity of the data environment and the sub-optimal quality of software tools in the sector (though this may be a 'UK' issue rather than a global one;-).

If you have had similar experiences I welcome the opportunity to learn of them.

Ian.

It's only been in the last 12-months that BIG DATA and Cloud CRM data-marts have come of age.  Traditionally auto-dealers and OEMs have attempted to build a 'single view of their customers' by implementing a Dealer Management System, or sometimes a CRM system (or both).  But the nature of IT is that anytime an attempt is made to build a repository of customer data, something happens to create 'another place' for customer data to reside.

It's not uncommon nowadays for auto-dealers to operate a DMS, a separate showroom system, another separate lead management system and yet another separate contact centre system.  This means for marketers, gaining the SINGLE VIEW of customer data they seek becomes a painful task of manually producing reports from each system, mashing the data together on a spreadsheet and then spending hours crunching the data to make sense of it.  When auto-dealers are producing many promotional campaigns from many different systems, it's easy to imagine how time consuming this activity becomes - and how difficult it is to know which customers are being overmarketed to and which rarely have any contact.

This is where Cloud CRM data-marts come in.  They're a cloud information management environment purposely designed to serve the needs of marketers and the customer sciences industry to dig around customer data, to accelerate business improvement and to create high impact promotional campaigns, improve customer service and aid customer retention.

In its truest definition Customer Science is... 'the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behavior of customers through observation and experiment.' Of course, not all, (in fact very few) auto-dealers and OEMs practice customer science - most would be happy enough to make sure each of their customers has a scheduled MOT reminder, next service date and a flag that prompts sales people to call them after 2-years to see about upgrading them to the next model!

In this article I introduce Customer Science.

One of the essential ingredients for marketers and customer scientists is the need to assimilate data in an organized and cleansed form.  This is helped by the automated extract, transform, merge and normalize tools that are built into platforms like Encanvas.  Another key capability is the ability to source actionable insights from the harvested customer data by employing dashboards, charts, visualizations, maps and other operational analytical tools.

It's only been in the last 12-months that BIG DATA and Cloud CRM data-marts have come of age.  Traditionally auto-dealers and OEMs have attempted to build a 'single view of their customers' by implementing a Dealer Management System, or sometimes a CRM system (or both).  But the nature of IT is that anytime an attempt is made to build a repository of customer data, something happens to create 'another place' for customer data to reside.

It's not uncommon nowadays for auto-dealers to operate a DMS, a separate showroom system, another separate lead management system and yet another separate contact centre system.  This means for marketers, gaining the SINGLE VIEW of customer data they seek becomes a painful task of manually producing reports from each system, mashing the data together on a spreadsheet and then spending hours crunching the data to make sense of it.  When auto-dealers are producing many promotional campaigns from many different systems, it's easy to imagine how time consuming this activity becomes - and how difficult it is to know which customers are being overmarketed to and which rarely have any contact.

This is where Cloud CRM data-marts come in.  They're a cloud information management environment purposely designed to serve the needs of marketers and the customer sciences industry to dig around customer data, to accelerate business improvement and to create high impact promotional campaigns, improve customer service and aid customer retention.

In its truest definition Customer Science is... 'the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behavior of customers through observation and experiment.' Of course, not all, (in fact very few) auto-dealers and OEMs practice customer science - most would be happy enough to make sure each of their customers has a scheduled MOT reminder, next service date and a flag that prompts sales people to call them after 2-years to see about upgrading them to the next model!

In this article I introduce Customer Science.

One of the essential ingredients for marketers and customer scientists is the need to assimilate data in an organized and cleansed form.  This is helped by the automated extract, transform, merge and normalize tools that are built into platforms like Encanvas.  Another key capability is the ability to source actionable insights from the harvested customer data by employing dashboards, charts, visualizations, maps and other operational analytical tools.

One of the great pains of being a marketer is getting customer lists prepared for campaigns. It sounds such a simple task to perform but all too often it becomes an activity that fills the day and keeps marketers working away until the wee hours.

There are a number of obstacles to overcome:

1. Getting the data

It starts with trying to source the data from the back-office systems that hold it.  Most dealers will use a dealer management system and will need to produce one or many reports to export the data.  Marketers might also want to exploit data held in contact centre, lead management and showroom systems where prospect records are held that contain useful email address and phone numbers (etc.) that aren’t held in the DMS.

2. Merging the data

Having got the data files, it’s then normally a question of merging the records together on a spreadsheet (fun) so long as the spreadsheet can cope with the volume of records and doesn’t present the dreaded ‘hung’ screen of death.

3. Cleansing, de-duping and transforming data

Then the real fun starts getting to work on the data using the tools provided by a spreadsheet to concatenate fields, delete unwanted fields and records, expose duplicates and delete them etc.

4. Sorting and filtering data

Having got the records in a consistent level of quality, then happens the task of distilling the records that are wanted for the campaign using filtering and sorting tools (a much more pleasant and rewarding task after all that data crunching).

5. Uploading data to campaign communications tools and systems

The final task is to get the data uploaded into the campaign communications apps that your business uses.  This can be frustratingly awkward if the upload tools are not easy to configure.  Often marketers will find they have to keep re-organizing their spreadsheet of data and save it into a .csv format in order to be accepted by the consuming application.

Having done all of the above and left the office at 11.00pm, the most disappointing thing for marketers is knowing that you’re going to have to go through this entire process all over again the next time you want to produce another campaign list!  It would also be a rarity for campaign systems to record the campaign against the source customer record which means marketers have no idea which customers are being over-marketed to and with others are being under-marketed to.

Thank goodness for cloud CRM data-marts.

Fortunately nowadays dealer marketers have the opportunity to overcome these issues by subscribing to a Cloud CRM data-mart service. What these services do is automate the harvesting of data from the various dealer management systems and third party apps a dealership employs, invoke algorithms that act on the data to automatically cleanse, de-dupe and transform it to then create a relational database in the cloud for marketers to gain a single-version-of-the-truth of their customer data and interrogate it.

Given that we’re talking about the precious commodity of customer data, protecting the data and making sure it’s not accessible to the wrong people (including unscrupulous employees) is always going to be a big concern to business execs.  Providers of Cloud CRM Data-Mart technologies like Encanvas provide their customers with their exclusive private cloud to secure customer data being used.  The only way to access the data is via a secure login and EVEN with a login, only certain roles have access to the data – with each query and request logged on the system, so it’s known who is accessing the system at any time (note: these are named users, not ‘terminal numbers’ or IP-addresses and things that don’t expose the actual name of the user).

Here’s how the same process works using a Cloud CRM data-mart:

1. Getting the data

Using powerful Extract, Transform and Load tools (normally supplied as part of a Cloud CRM data-mart) uploads from back-office and third party systems are automated and uploaded to the cloud having been checked for their consistency.

2. Merging, cleansing, de-duping and transforming data

The harvested data may go through a second, third or fourth ‘transform’ to do things like merging and cleansing.  Users don’t see all this work happening as clever algorithms take care of the data crunching.

3. Sorting and filtering data

Once the harvested data populates the cloud data-mart, that’s when the fun really happens.  Using the drop-down filters, and radio-button selection tools marketers can sort and filter their customer data to obtain the precise record selections they want to act on.

5. Uploading data to campaign communications tools and systems

Having produced the record selections, normally a Cloud CRM data-mart can be configured to populate the target third party application so in most cases there’s no need to suffer the hassle of manually uploading data.

It used to take me 2-4 hours to create a campaign list of customer records (sometimes it even took longer due to data quality issues).  Using a Cloud CRM platform removes the challenges of running through the process I’ve highlighted above and gives you a good reason to head off home from the office on-time.  But perhaps the biggest reward from using the technology is that it enables marketers to install a sustainable method of keeping data quality right up there so you don’t have to repeat the data cleansing activities ALL OVER AGAIN on the next campaign.

Cheers Mr. Cloud.  At least one marketer just loves what you bring to the party.

One of the great pains of being a marketer is getting customer lists prepared for campaigns. It sounds such a simple task to perform but all too often it becomes an activity that fills the day and keeps marketers working away until the wee hours.

There are a number of obstacles to overcome:

1. Getting the data

It starts with trying to source the data from the back-office systems that hold it.  Most dealers will use a dealer management system and will need to produce one or many reports to export the data.  Marketers might also want to exploit data held in contact centre, lead management and showroom systems where prospect records are held that contain useful email address and phone numbers (etc.) that aren’t held in the DMS.

2. Merging the data

Having got the data files, it’s then normally a question of merging the records together on a spreadsheet (fun) so long as the spreadsheet can cope with the volume of records and doesn’t present the dreaded ‘hung’ screen of death.

3. Cleansing, de-duping and transforming data

Then the real fun starts getting to work on the data using the tools provided by a spreadsheet to concatenate fields, delete unwanted fields and records, expose duplicates and delete them etc.

4. Sorting and filtering data

Having got the records in a consistent level of quality, then happens the task of distilling the records that are wanted for the campaign using filtering and sorting tools (a much more pleasant and rewarding task after all that data crunching).

5. Uploading data to campaign communications tools and systems

The final task is to get the data uploaded into the campaign communications apps that your business uses.  This can be frustratingly awkward if the upload tools are not easy to configure.  Often marketers will find they have to keep re-organizing their spreadsheet of data and save it into a .csv format in order to be accepted by the consuming application.

Having done all of the above and left the office at 11.00pm, the most disappointing thing for marketers is knowing that you’re going to have to go through this entire process all over again the next time you want to produce another campaign list!  It would also be a rarity for campaign systems to record the campaign against the source customer record which means marketers have no idea which customers are being over-marketed to and with others are being under-marketed to.

Thank goodness for cloud CRM data-marts.

Fortunately nowadays dealer marketers have the opportunity to overcome these issues by subscribing to a Cloud CRM data-mart service. What these services do is automate the harvesting of data from the various dealer management systems and third party apps a dealership employs, invoke algorithms that act on the data to automatically cleanse, de-dupe and transform it to then create a relational database in the cloud for marketers to gain a single-version-of-the-truth of their customer data and interrogate it.

Given that we’re talking about the precious commodity of customer data, protecting the data and making sure it’s not accessible to the wrong people (including unscrupulous employees) is always going to be a big concern to business execs.  Providers of Cloud CRM Data-Mart technologies like Encanvas provide their customers with their exclusive private cloud to secure customer data being used.  The only way to access the data is via a secure login and EVEN with a login, only certain roles have access to the data – with each query and request logged on the system, so it’s known who is accessing the system at any time (note: these are named users, not ‘terminal numbers’ or IP-addresses and things that don’t expose the actual name of the user).

Here’s how the same process works using a Cloud CRM data-mart:

1. Getting the data

Using powerful Extract, Transform and Load tools (normally supplied as part of a Cloud CRM data-mart) uploads from back-office and third party systems are automated and uploaded to the cloud having been checked for their consistency.

2. Merging, cleansing, de-duping and transforming data

The harvested data may go through a second, third or fourth ‘transform’ to do things like merging and cleansing.  Users don’t see all this work happening as clever algorithms take care of the data crunching.

3. Sorting and filtering data

Once the harvested data populates the cloud data-mart, that’s when the fun really happens.  Using the drop-down filters, and radio-button selection tools marketers can sort and filter their customer data to obtain the precise record selections they want to act on.

5. Uploading data to campaign communications tools and systems

Having produced the record selections, normally a Cloud CRM data-mart can be configured to populate the target third party application so in most cases there’s no need to suffer the hassle of manually uploading data.

It used to take me 2-4 hours to create a campaign list of customer records (sometimes it even took longer due to data quality issues).  Using a Cloud CRM platform removes the challenges of running through the process I’ve highlighted above and gives you a good reason to head off home from the office on-time.  But perhaps the biggest reward from using the technology is that it enables marketers to install a sustainable method of keeping data quality right up there so you don’t have to repeat the data cleansing activities ALL OVER AGAIN on the next campaign.

Cheers Mr. Cloud.  At least one marketer just loves what you bring to the party.

When you're a marketer or dealer manager it can be overwhelming to look at hundreds, if not thousands of customer records.  I've seen marketing managers staring at pages of spreadsheet tables trying to make sense of all the customer data they hold wondering quite where to start to make sense of it all.  

And in the real-world customer data is neither consistent or complete.  It's normally gathered from different places and is often poorly treated by sales and aftersales folk that see manual data entry as a time consuming waste of time. Only marketing people truly know the painful impact poor customer data entry has on business opportunity (and their personal life-style when they find themselves sitting in front of the telly with family manually correcting telephone numbers and zip codes!) when they attempt their next marketing campaign!

Buying personas are a useful way to make sense of customer data.  It's a method of clustering types of customer so that you focus your marketing on the most important customers first.  This doesn't mean that ANY customer should be treated vastly differently - one would hope that every customer enjoys your best customer service - it's simply about prioritization and resourcing.  There are only so many hours in the day and dollars in the marketing budget, so it makes sense for dealers to do what they can to align effort and investment to potential returns.  In this article I describe the 5 common buying personas that all dealer need to understand - and why.

At NDMC we define the buyer behaviour of private vehicle buyers through fourn buying personas:

Cherished Teddies 

These are loyal buyers that consistently reach within 20% of their future planned life-time value. Typically these customers will purchase service or loyalty plans (often with additional insurances or paint protection options) to make sure their dealership can look after their needs. For this group dealers should have a very complete picture of the customer profile.  Cherished Teddies need looking after because they are the group most likely to recommend others buy their vehicles from your dealership!

Loyal Dogs 

These are vehicle buyers that purchase after-sales products but don't achieve the future planned life-time value.  Understanding why this group doesn't achieve their future life-time spend is helpful because it can point to weaknesses in your offerings or aspects of local competition that you're not aware of.  At the same time, it pays to contrast buyer behaviour with affluence ratings given that it may well be that Loyal Dogs WANT to be Cherished Teddies - they just can't afford to be ;-)

Cats 

These are  buyers that have purchased a vehicle from you but only come back for aftersales services when it suits them.  Just like cats you can't rely on their loyalty and you have to work harder to get their attention.  Cats are harder to love because they're not around as much. The obvious thought is 'What does it take to turn a Cat into a Loyal Dog?

Neighbours' Cat

These are buyers that haven't bought from your dealership but have bought services or parts. Perhaps these customers are 'sampling your dealership' to understand how well they get treated. If you pay them more attention, perhaps they will become your Cat in time.

And the OTHERS

With any persona building exercise there will be the 'also ran' list of customers that 

Benefits of persona building

The benefits of persona building ae many and varied but to summarise, it helps marketers to:

1. Prioritize data cleansing/improvement activities

If you have 2000 customers, it might well be that your business generates the majority of its income from the top 500.  There's a good argument that this top 500 of customer relationships should contain very accurate and complete data records.  Once you've got the top 500 sorted then you can move on to the rest!

2. Prioritize marketing spend

At NDMC we've created marketing dashboards to enable dealers to view their customers by person category.  Marketing spend focuses on the most likely customers to spend money and most compelling reasons that customers will spend their money on.  Again, once a strategy has been established to secure the returns of the mos likely to spend customers, downstream campaigns can be established for the next segment and the next after that (etc.)

3. Get to know your customers better!

It's quite remarkable what persona building does to help decision makers better understand the buying behaviors and activities of customers.  When sales activities and revenues are recorded by persona segmentation, managers can build up a very complete picture of how customers are interacting with their business.

If you'd like to find out more information about persona building and examples of marketing systems we've developed for other dealers around the world, please do get in touch.

When you're a marketer or dealer manager it can be overwhelming to look at hundreds, if not thousands of customer records.  I've seen marketing managers staring at pages of spreadsheet tables trying to make sense of all the customer data they hold wondering quite where to start to make sense of it all.  

And in the real-world customer data is neither consistent or complete.  It's normally gathered from different places and is often poorly treated by sales and aftersales folk that see manual data entry as a time consuming waste of time. Only marketing people truly know the painful impact poor customer data entry has on business opportunity (and their personal life-style when they find themselves sitting in front of the telly with family manually correcting telephone numbers and zip codes!) when they attempt their next marketing campaign!

Buying personas are a useful way to make sense of customer data.  It's a method of clustering types of customer so that you focus your marketing on the most important customers first.  This doesn't mean that ANY customer should be treated vastly differently - one would hope that every customer enjoys your best customer service - it's simply about prioritization and resourcing.  There are only so many hours in the day and dollars in the marketing budget, so it makes sense for dealers to do what they can to align effort and investment to potential returns.  In this article I describe the 5 common buying personas that all dealer need to understand - and why.

At NDMC we define the buyer behaviour of private vehicle buyers through fourn buying personas:

Cherished Teddies 

These are loyal buyers that consistently reach within 20% of their future planned life-time value. Typically these customers will purchase service or loyalty plans (often with additional insurances or paint protection options) to make sure their dealership can look after their needs. For this group dealers should have a very complete picture of the customer profile.  Cherished Teddies need looking after because they are the group most likely to recommend others buy their vehicles from your dealership!

Loyal Dogs 

These are vehicle buyers that purchase after-sales products but don't achieve the future planned life-time value.  Understanding why this group doesn't achieve their future life-time spend is helpful because it can point to weaknesses in your offerings or aspects of local competition that you're not aware of.  At the same time, it pays to contrast buyer behaviour with affluence ratings given that it may well be that Loyal Dogs WANT to be Cherished Teddies - they just can't afford to be ;-)

Cats 

These are  buyers that have purchased a vehicle from you but only come back for aftersales services when it suits them.  Just like cats you can't rely on their loyalty and you have to work harder to get their attention.  Cats are harder to love because they're not around as much. The obvious thought is 'What does it take to turn a Cat into a Loyal Dog?

Neighbours' Cat

These are buyers that haven't bought from your dealership but have bought services or parts. Perhaps these customers are 'sampling your dealership' to understand how well they get treated. If you pay them more attention, perhaps they will become your Cat in time.

And the OTHERS

With any persona building exercise there will be the 'also ran' list of customers that 

Benefits of persona building

The benefits of persona building ae many and varied but to summarise, it helps marketers to:

1. Prioritize data cleansing/improvement activities

If you have 2000 customers, it might well be that your business generates the majority of its income from the top 500.  There's a good argument that this top 500 of customer relationships should contain very accurate and complete data records.  Once you've got the top 500 sorted then you can move on to the rest!

2. Prioritize marketing spend

At NDMC we've created marketing dashboards to enable dealers to view their customers by person category.  Marketing spend focuses on the most likely customers to spend money and most compelling reasons that customers will spend their money on.  Again, once a strategy has been established to secure the returns of the mos likely to spend customers, downstream campaigns can be established for the next segment and the next after that (etc.)

3. Get to know your customers better!

It's quite remarkable what persona building does to help decision makers better understand the buying behaviors and activities of customers.  When sales activities and revenues are recorded by persona segmentation, managers can build up a very complete picture of how customers are interacting with their business.

If you'd like to find out more information about persona building and examples of marketing systems we've developed for other dealers around the world, please do get in touch.

Some people love him, others loathe him but there is no question that Sir Terry Leahy, the CEO of Tesco's during its heady rise to the top of the UK retail industry, is the master of what IT people nowadays call 'Big Data' or what CEOs and leaders increasingly describe as 'Data Investment Management'.

These new titles describe an activity that's been around for decades; the end-to-end process of learning from customer data, analyzing it to then apply the learning lessons that matter to deliver more efficient processes, better (more effective) marketing and an improved customer experience.

In this 2011 article by Ian Grant of Computer Weekly under the title 'Tesco uses customer data to stride ahead of competition' Terry Leahy talks about his thoughts on the value Tesco has gained from its focus on Data Investment Management.

In 1995 Tesco gave customers incentive to join its Clubcard incentive scheme by giving them a penny discount in a pound spent. This was 25% of its profit at the time!  This resonates even more today because in a recent interview, the founder of Amazon Jeff Bezos stated that Data Investment Management is around 25% of ITS business.

It begs the question how much should Motor Dealerships be investing in their own Data Investment Management strategies.  The good news is that since the early days of customer insights capture and analysis there have been a heap of new technologies and Brontobytes of data added to the wibbly wobbly web that make it much more cost effective for organizations to implement effective systems.

If you've not had the opportunity to read this article I'd encourage you to spend a couple of minutes going through it.  It's well worth the time investment.

I.

Some people love him, others loathe him but there is no question that Sir Terry Leahy, the CEO of Tesco's during its heady rise to the top of the UK retail industry, is the master of what IT people nowadays call 'Big Data' or what CEOs and leaders increasingly describe as 'Data Investment Management'.

These new titles describe an activity that's been around for decades; the end-to-end process of learning from customer data, analyzing it to then apply the learning lessons that matter to deliver more efficient processes, better (more effective) marketing and an improved customer experience.

In this 2011 article by Ian Grant of Computer Weekly under the title 'Tesco uses customer data to stride ahead of competition' Terry Leahy talks about his thoughts on the value Tesco has gained from its focus on Data Investment Management.

In 1995 Tesco gave customers incentive to join its Clubcard incentive scheme by giving them a penny discount in a pound spent. This was 25% of its profit at the time!  This resonates even more today because in a recent interview, the founder of Amazon Jeff Bezos stated that Data Investment Management is around 25% of ITS business.

It begs the question how much should Motor Dealerships be investing in their own Data Investment Management strategies.  The good news is that since the early days of customer insights capture and analysis there have been a heap of new technologies and Brontobytes of data added to the wibbly wobbly web that make it much more cost effective for organizations to implement effective systems.

If you've not had the opportunity to read this article I'd encourage you to spend a couple of minutes going through it.  It's well worth the time investment.

I.