Customer Science in Motor Retail

How does Motor Retail benefit from applying operational analytical tools to source actionable insights? 

In this series of keynote articles I explore how the coming together of mobile computing, innovations in customer science and advances in big data analysis are creating the perfect storm for marketers in motor retail.

…

Keynote 3.

5 Actionable Insights That Every Dealer Should Have

Actionable Insights are those views of data that cause managers to ask new questions about how processes work and take action.  They differ from key performance measures and daily operating control (DOC) reports that focus on delivering a picture of progress against a strategic objective, operating budget or forecast.  What are the top 5 actionable insights that every motor dealer should have?

…

Motor Dealerships are a complex multi-disciplinary business operation.  The aspects of activity are so many and varied that managing performance and growth requires a clear head and clarity over the objectives that really matter.  Every dealership has a different combination of capabilities and franchises that add an extra layer of ‘uniqueness’ to the reporting systems required.  So is it possible to pinpoint just five actionable insights that all dealership exec teams should have access to?  I believe it is.  In this article I suggest my top 5 list of actionable insights together with an explanation of why they’re important.

1. Consolidated Performance Scorecard

A scorecard is a dashboard that incorporates a series of objectives that an organization is striving to achieve.  In most organizations the number of objectives defined in a scorecard is in the order of 12-16 as any more becomes unmanageable.  A consolidated performance scorecard provides a topline view of progress towards business outcomes.  It’s essential for any organization to know how it defines success and seek to achieve it.  Scorecards are therefore valuable and useful management tool to articulate and communicate progress towards strategic outcomes – BUT… the point about objectives, and the key performance indicators used to measure progress towards them, is they should be ‘stuff’ that managers already know to be important.  This type of reporting is therefore ‘handy’ but it would be difficult to argue KPIs are ‘actionable insights’ as they rarely encourage managers to take action in themselves.  What starts the journey of objectives and KPIs becoming ‘actionable’ insights occurs when managers can drill-down into the data that is the source of the KPI.  When managers drill into data and ‘become curious’ the magical and mysterious kapow! explosion happens that leads to processes being improved, new initiatives tabled and the like.   A Consolidated Performance Scorecard gives the entire management team a snapshot of how THEY are performing to meet strategic outcomes.  It’s my FIRST actionable insight because it STEERS the ship.

2. Consolidated DOC Side-by-Side Dealership Analysis

The Daily Operating Control is a report that summarizes how each revenue generator and discipline of a motor dealership is performing.  What normally gets covered are the revenue generating pipelines of the dealership including MOTs, parts sales, red and amber Vehicle Health Check (VHC) / deferred works, service hours, warranty repairs, oil, tyres, bodyshop repairs and more.  Most dealers I know favor a side-by-side analysis of branch performance because it encourages competition – and the comparison between franchises and dealerships makes for interesting reading (to understand which business units are performing well, which are performing poorly, all judged on the same scale given that organizations commonly struggle to compare performance between business units when managers seek to qualify ‘what good looks like’ using their own scale.  The Consolidated DOC gives managers across the business a daily progress report and a month-to-date summary that provides opportunity to correct sub-optimal performance before it’s too late.  It is the epitome of ‘actionable insights’ in the operational reporting world and becomes my SECOND ‘must-have’ actionable insight for dealerships.

3. Customer Persona Profiling Summary

It’s always been important to manage customer relationships one customer-at-a-time as Don Peppers and Martha Rodgers put it but as customers become ever more distant and empowered, the need to build digital personas has moved on to a new level of priority.  I’ve struggled to understand why the Motor Retail industry has been so slow to adopt customer profiling and persona building when retailers such as Tesco with their Clubcard system and online companies like Amazon have so clearly demonstrated the business rewards, but I do see this initial reticence is changing as more dealers become ever more aware of the potential to boost growth by simply harvesting their most important asset – their customer relationships. There are many sides of a customer relationship – communications preferences, activity history, contact points, location, buyer behavior, life-time value, future life-time value, affluence… - and it’s when you combine these views that exciting things happen.  There are many ways to build personas and through them, marketers and sales leaders see patterns of likes, spend habits and relationship characteristics that lead to new campaigns and better ways of sourcing customer value.  A customer profiling persona summary presents a one-page view of the many different facets of your customer community.  It covers not just ONE customers’ characteristics but overlays ALL of your customers in one ‘map’ of your customer universe.  It makes for very interesting reading and becomes my THIRD actionable insight.

4. Customer Happiness Index

Customer happiness matters because it’s the lion in the cave that comes out to bite your business unless you keep an eye on it.  There are many ways organizations can measure and monitor customer happiness but dealers can still struggle to place a ‘happiness index’ on their business that produces a snapshot of happiness and trending.  In addition to manufacturer sponsored analysis, many dealers are creatively sourcing happiness data by using simple tools on their websites and paying third party.   I’m also a big fan of soft-measures that systems like www.tag-check.com are excellent at sourcing.  You can’t hope to build Loyalty Beyond Reason when your customers are unhappy; it’s even a big call to ask for respect (sometimes described as love in plain clothes!).  Installing a customer happiness index is my fourth actionable insight.

5. Mapping Customers and Qualifying Addressable (Local) Market

Understanding the opportunity of a dealer within their locality helps to qualify how well a dealer is doing compared to how well IT COULD be.  It’s not difficult to plot customers on a map.  In countries like the UK and the Netherlands mapping customers is made easier by the quality of the postcode system.  In other countries like the United States and South Africa, postal codes are not very accurate and it takes street address details to accurately plot customers (far less convenient!).  Once customers are plotted it’s relatively easy to assign customer attributes to records so map views can be filtered by dealership, sales team, sales person, affluence, persona, outstanding MOT reminders – whatever.  If your customer records include a CAMEO (‘affluence’) profile, companies like www.improvemydata.com  make it pretty easy to obtain a listing of similar customers in your region.  This makes it possible to understand your MARKET SHARE! How cool is that?  Maps are great!! I’ve never produced a mapping application that hasn’t shown something interesting for dealers to see.  That’s why creating a map view of the customer landscape and qualifying the addressable local market is my fifth actionable insight that every dealer should have access to.

The list above is MY top five.  If you have other opinions or examples I’d be very interested to hear about them!

Customer Science in Motor Retail

How does Motor Retail benefit from applying operational analytical tools to source actionable insights? 

In this series of keynote articles I explore how the coming together of mobile computing, innovations in customer science and advances in big data analysis are creating the perfect storm for marketers in motor retail.

…

Keynote 3.

5 Actionable Insights That Every Dealer Should Have

Actionable Insights are those views of data that cause managers to ask new questions about how processes work and take action.  They differ from key performance measures and daily operating control (DOC) reports that focus on delivering a picture of progress against a strategic objective, operating budget or forecast.  What are the top 5 actionable insights that every motor dealer should have?

…

Motor Dealerships are a complex multi-disciplinary business operation.  The aspects of activity are so many and varied that managing performance and growth requires a clear head and clarity over the objectives that really matter.  Every dealership has a different combination of capabilities and franchises that add an extra layer of ‘uniqueness’ to the reporting systems required.  So is it possible to pinpoint just five actionable insights that all dealership exec teams should have access to?  I believe it is.  In this article I suggest my top 5 list of actionable insights together with an explanation of why they’re important.

1. Consolidated Performance Scorecard

A scorecard is a dashboard that incorporates a series of objectives that an organization is striving to achieve.  In most organizations the number of objectives defined in a scorecard is in the order of 12-16 as any more becomes unmanageable.  A consolidated performance scorecard provides a topline view of progress towards business outcomes.  It’s essential for any organization to know how it defines success and seek to achieve it.  Scorecards are therefore valuable and useful management tool to articulate and communicate progress towards strategic outcomes – BUT… the point about objectives, and the key performance indicators used to measure progress towards them, is they should be ‘stuff’ that managers already know to be important.  This type of reporting is therefore ‘handy’ but it would be difficult to argue KPIs are ‘actionable insights’ as they rarely encourage managers to take action in themselves.  What starts the journey of objectives and KPIs becoming ‘actionable’ insights occurs when managers can drill-down into the data that is the source of the KPI.  When managers drill into data and ‘become curious’ the magical and mysterious kapow! explosion happens that leads to processes being improved, new initiatives tabled and the like.   A Consolidated Performance Scorecard gives the entire management team a snapshot of how THEY are performing to meet strategic outcomes.  It’s my FIRST actionable insight because it STEERS the ship.

2. Consolidated DOC Side-by-Side Dealership Analysis

The Daily Operating Control is a report that summarizes how each revenue generator and discipline of a motor dealership is performing.  What normally gets covered are the revenue generating pipelines of the dealership including MOTs, parts sales, red and amber Vehicle Health Check (VHC) / deferred works, service hours, warranty repairs, oil, tyres, bodyshop repairs and more.  Most dealers I know favor a side-by-side analysis of branch performance because it encourages competition – and the comparison between franchises and dealerships makes for interesting reading (to understand which business units are performing well, which are performing poorly, all judged on the same scale given that organizations commonly struggle to compare performance between business units when managers seek to qualify ‘what good looks like’ using their own scale.  The Consolidated DOC gives managers across the business a daily progress report and a month-to-date summary that provides opportunity to correct sub-optimal performance before it’s too late.  It is the epitome of ‘actionable insights’ in the operational reporting world and becomes my SECOND ‘must-have’ actionable insight for dealerships.

3. Customer Persona Profiling Summary

It’s always been important to manage customer relationships one customer-at-a-time as Don Peppers and Martha Rodgers put it but as customers become ever more distant and empowered, the need to build digital personas has moved on to a new level of priority.  I’ve struggled to understand why the Motor Retail industry has been so slow to adopt customer profiling and persona building when retailers such as Tesco with their Clubcard system and online companies like Amazon have so clearly demonstrated the business rewards, but I do see this initial reticence is changing as more dealers become ever more aware of the potential to boost growth by simply harvesting their most important asset – their customer relationships. There are many sides of a customer relationship – communications preferences, activity history, contact points, location, buyer behavior, life-time value, future life-time value, affluence… - and it’s when you combine these views that exciting things happen.  There are many ways to build personas and through them, marketers and sales leaders see patterns of likes, spend habits and relationship characteristics that lead to new campaigns and better ways of sourcing customer value.  A customer profiling persona summary presents a one-page view of the many different facets of your customer community.  It covers not just ONE customers’ characteristics but overlays ALL of your customers in one ‘map’ of your customer universe.  It makes for very interesting reading and becomes my THIRD actionable insight.

4. Customer Happiness Index

Customer happiness matters because it’s the lion in the cave that comes out to bite your business unless you keep an eye on it.  There are many ways organizations can measure and monitor customer happiness but dealers can still struggle to place a ‘happiness index’ on their business that produces a snapshot of happiness and trending.  In addition to manufacturer sponsored analysis, many dealers are creatively sourcing happiness data by using simple tools on their websites and paying third party.   I’m also a big fan of soft-measures that systems like www.tag-check.com are excellent at sourcing.  You can’t hope to build Loyalty Beyond Reason when your customers are unhappy; it’s even a big call to ask for respect (sometimes described as love in plain clothes!).  Installing a customer happiness index is my fourth actionable insight.

5. Mapping Customers and Qualifying Addressable (Local) Market

Understanding the opportunity of a dealer within their locality helps to qualify how well a dealer is doing compared to how well IT COULD be.  It’s not difficult to plot customers on a map.  In countries like the UK and the Netherlands mapping customers is made easier by the quality of the postcode system.  In other countries like the United States and South Africa, postal codes are not very accurate and it takes street address details to accurately plot customers (far less convenient!).  Once customers are plotted it’s relatively easy to assign customer attributes to records so map views can be filtered by dealership, sales team, sales person, affluence, persona, outstanding MOT reminders – whatever.  If your customer records include a CAMEO (‘affluence’) profile, companies like www.improvemydata.com  make it pretty easy to obtain a listing of similar customers in your region.  This makes it possible to understand your MARKET SHARE! How cool is that?  Maps are great!! I’ve never produced a mapping application that hasn’t shown something interesting for dealers to see.  That’s why creating a map view of the customer landscape and qualifying the addressable local market is my fifth actionable insight that every dealer should have access to.

The list above is MY top five.  If you have other opinions or examples I’d be very interested to hear about them!

Actionable Insights are those views of data that cause managers to ask new questions about how processes work and take action.  They differ from key performance measures and daily operating control (DOC) reports that focus on delivering a picture of progress against a strategic objective, operating budget or forecast.  What actionable insights can dealers expect to source from their Dealer Management Systems – and how do they source them?

...

Most motor retailers employ a Dealer Management System (DMS) to manage and administer all facets of their business operations.  The typical components of a Dealer Management System include Financials, Showroom and Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Parts, Service, Workshop Management, Point-of-Sale, Franchise Data, Vehicle Stock, Purchasing and Pricing Administration.

Many of the Dealer Management Systems that exist in the motor retail sector are proprietary systems and some of the technology employed dates back to the pre-noughties when the world had never heard of cloud computing and mobile phones were the size of a small brick.

The reason why the industry has been so slow to adopt change in IT has a lot to do with the complexity of the dealer information environment and the close synergies of the many operational areas that exist in a dealership.  As part of a tightly knit supply chain, dealers also need their systems to talk to the systems operated by the motor manufacturers.  These integrations are also complex, hard to create and adapt. Dealers ideally want to have a single information environment so to meet their need. This means software vendors have to invest hugely in attaining the ‘critical mass’ of capabilities the industry demands before they can hope to compete with incumbents.  This creates a natural barrier to new software vendor entrants hoping to enter the market.

The consequence of this market stagnation in viable competitive DMS options for major dealer groups means many are required to operate computer systems that are poor at sharing their data and exposing the actionable insights that dealer execs need.

In a market where competition is growing daily, dealers know they need to be much better at understanding the relationship with their customers, better at producing personalized offers that are event-driven, fine-grained and relevant, and better at finding more reasons to speak to customers that are ever more distant and only happy to engage with suppliers when it suits them.

Data Discovery from Dealer Management Systems

The quality and completeness of operational analytical tools found in Dealer Management Systems varies hugely.  Many of the younger software products include highly impressive reporting tools that are ideal for understanding the performance of pipelines and processes.  Where most dealer systems tend to fall down is their ability to source ‘holistic’ views of customer profiling, interaction and life-time value.

The essence of customer science is to gain a single page view of the customer that uncovers all aspects of the relationship including:

• Profile: Affluence, location, family status, employment, habits etc.
• Persona: What makes them ‘individual’
• Communication: Communications history, activities and preferences
• Driver behavior: How the customer drives their vehicle and the impact on vehicle depreciation and maintenance schedules
• Buying behavior: What do they buy, how do they buy, likes and dislikes; what sort of relationship do they want to have with their suppliers?
• Products: What vehicles do they have, like, have had previously?  What other products and services have they used, would they like?
• Life-time value: What is the potential value of business derived from this individual

Uncovering these insights is valuable – useful - but it’s only when these many attributes can be connected that the eureka moments occur and marketers and their customer service colleagues uncover the gold dust that makes their campaigns more effective and raises the bar on their customer experience.

As a general rule, Dealer Management Systems are designed to support the many key processes that exist within a motor dealership.  By analyzing generic capabilities of motor dealerships we now know there are approximately 136 major processes that occur within a motor dealership.  These are supplemented by close to 200 common reports and approximately 150 primary referencing tables.  You get the picture – it’s complicated.

When software applications are built for a purpose the data models that underpin them take on that form.  In the case of Dealer Management Systems that means that most data models are poorly designed and include the same tables time and again in different parts of the data structure for different reasons.  For example, the field ‘Country’ will appear in customer and supplier addresses.  It will also appear in delivery locations and other records.  But will there be a single table for ‘Countries’?  Probably not.

So what?

The implication of this confused data structure is that execs that want to see customer views by activity, service used, spend (etc.) won’t be able to easily source these views because the data will be held in many separate silos and in the wrong structures too.  It also means that dealers, when they look at the data, they won’t necessarily know if they’re examining a list of vehicles from the CRM system, or a similar list of vehicles from their Vehicle Stock Book.

Advances in ‘Actionable Insights’ Data Harvesting

The good news is that cloud computing has introduced smarter ways of harvesting and creating new views of data that remove the hit and miss complexity of constantly trying to mash views on a spreadsheet.  How it basically works is this:

1. Flat files reports (the type you produce on a spreadsheet with no pivot tables) are produced for each master process area.  These are designed to contain the magic fields that identify customers, vehicles, sales people, dealerships and other key identifiers.
2. These flat files are uploaded to a ‘sorting’ engine that normalizes the data, uncovers errors and brings the various flat files together in the form of a relational database ‘in the cloud’.  This new data structure is sometimes called a ‘data mart’ – not to be confused with a ‘data warehouse’ which is a much more rigid, pre-planned data architecture for preprocessing views of data. 
3. Once the data is onboarded, data connections are automatically generated between the various magic fields (i.e. primary key identifiers of the subject records) and it’s now possible to start performing queries on the data to create the actionable insights execs want to see.

The above summary ignores the fact that there’s a lot of data NOT on Dealer Management Systems that can enrich customer profiling systems and add fresh perspectives to analysis such as customer experience data, website clicks and interactions, finance company data, service plan data, SMS messaging inbound/outbound activity, mapping resources and consumer profiling data resources from third party vendors.

Federated operational insights systems like the one I describe are best placed to harvest data in this way and remove the complexity and cost of sourcing data from Dealer Management Systems.  A few words of warning however:

• This type of system does not displace the need for effective operational reporting within the process-centric tools that run the business, though these are increasingly well catered for by vendors
• Operational analytical systems are rarely able to feed data back into the Dealer Management System, although why you’d need to do this I struggle to understand.  I suspect most managers want a ‘single version of the truth’ for the data they look at but few people care if it resides on one system nowadays.

Key Technology Components

The good news is that cloud computing has introduced smarter ways of harvesting and creating new views of data that don’t require people to invest time manually authoring reports or playing with data in spreadsheets – and thank goodness because anyone that’s had to do it knows how boring and tiresome to task of manually aggregating and normalizing data can be! 

There are a few crucial technology innovations that have made this possible:

Web Server Apps

Popular platforms like the Microsoft Web Platform (comprising of modules including Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft ASP.NET and Microsoft IIS) are able to publish applications in a format that means they can be viewed on a browser without requiring any downloads and plug-ins to the computer device.  That means you can view applications using mobile phones, tablets, PCs, laptops and smart digital televisions provided you have suitable User Permissions to login. Users are assigned to User Groups and their access and usability permissions are governed by the permissions assigned to the group, or groups, they belong to.  In a 24/7 world, users can experience the Martini moment of – anytime, anyplace and anywhere computing without having to fuss with onboard apps.

Private-Cloud Infrastructure

Deploying hosting web server apps on a private-cloud infrastructure means that buyers don’t need to fuss about installing web servers and managing them.  It removes the burden of installing hardware and software applications; and managing them.  Private-clouds can be configured for each account (so that each account has their own dedicated database and resources), or alternatively clouds can be multi-tenant environments where customers share the computing resources of the host web server.

Data Flow Augmentation and Data Extract, Transform and Load (ETL)

Something has to engineer the automated uploading, normalization, transformation and workflow of data to the cloud environment.  The tooling to do this now is relatively common-place.  What this automated routine needs to do is to watch a folder and wait for reports to turn up, or automatically kick into life at a scheduled time, to then audit the content and coax the data into the technology equivalent of a food blender that will spit out ‘good data that fulfils the upload criteria’. 

One of the clever features of this ‘blob’ of technology is that it needs to be capable of dealing with iterative changes to successive uploads of the same reports.  Let me have a go at explaining this:

When you upload several reports to the data crunching engine in the cloud for the first time, all is good with the world because there’s nothing else up there.  Do it again and the data crunching engine needs to sift through the fresh upload of data and work out: (1) What data exists and hasn’t changed? (2) What data exists but has been updated? and (3) What new records have been added that need to be included?

This is a non-trivial challenge and is an important feature of the data crunching engine.  Otherwise, the next time data is uploaded it will result in duplicates and lots of confusion (not good!).

Operational Analytics Software

There are many different sorts of operational analytics software (see my summary article on http://www.business2community.com/business-intelligence/operational-analytics-best-software-for-sourcing-actionable-insights-0560328 for more details) but some kind of data visualization and reporting tool-kit is needed to make the most of the harvested data.

Combine these four attributes – web apps, private-cloud deployment, data flow augmentation/ETL software and operational analytics software – and you have the essential ingredients of an Actionable Insights system that can harvest data from your DMS without have to work hard to do it!

Purchasing Options

There is a wide spectrum of technology vendors able to provide either components or complete platforms for authoring operational insights systems capable of extracting data painlessly from a DMS. There are also companies out there that provide marketing, data cleansing and customer science services targeted towards serving the specific needs of the dealer market. 

When it comes to the computing platform itself, as I summarize above, any solution needs to manage data crunching (to get the data in the right shape and form) together with data visualization and reporting tooling to make sense of it.  These ingredients with then need to reside on a server somewhere; more commonly now on a private-cloud to prevent the need to manually install hardware and software.

Buyers have a range of sourcing options to consider and these include:

1. Build your own system by using a highly dexterous and enterprise scalable cloud platform

There are too many of these to cover all of them but examples include the obvious BIG names like Microsoft Azure, cloud.google.com/appengine, Force.com (from Salesforce.com), WebSphereClouds or Amazon Cloud.  These big cloud tool-kits make development much easier than it used to be and all of the major vendors are on-point when it comes to scalability, security and resilience.  Don’t expect to have a quick solution though because it takes time and effort to get solutions ‘tuned’ to suit your needs.  Nevertheless, once you’re done you should have a first-class system.

In the last few years we’ve also seen a proliferation of smaller, expert cloud app platform vendors like CloudFoundry, CloudAppStudio and ActiveState that make it easier to design and publish custom applications to secure cloud environments, often demanding lower skills overheads.  The challenge facing these vendors is to ensure they can offer sufficiently complete platform capabilities.  They need to satisfy customers that they’re able to go the last mile on developments: The last thing customers want is to find, after months of a development, that some capabilities are missing and they have to start over on a bigger platform like IBM WebSphere, Amazon Cloud Web Services or Microsoft Azure that profit from the many millions of R&D dollars that bigger vendors have at their disposal.

2. Buy breed tool-kits

Getting a solution up-and-running faster can be achieved by selecting best-of-breed components. Two will be necessary to ‘fast-track your development;

1. A platform for designing the apps you need and managing the cloud data crunching using platforms like Interneer, Encanvas and OutSystems that offer out-of-the-box tooling to meet the majority of needs.  All of these providers provide ‘low or no’ coding overhead to the task of authoring applications.  They also possess rich data connectivity and workflow features.
2. An overlaid expert analytics tool-kit like Qlikview, Tibco Spotfire, Tableau, Yellowfin, Birst, iDashboards, Jedox and Jaspersoft.  These providers offer data visualization, dashboarding and reporting tools.

Of course, the nature of competition means that if you ask any of these vendors they will probably say they can offer a complete solution ;-)

3. Pay someone to build it for you

There are many companies out there like CSC, CACI, Canon, US Tech Solutions, Wipro, TCS, PA Consulting and countless smaller industry expert companies like DealerSolutions, Nybble and Ambridge Consulting that specialize in the data centric custom applications authoring arena.  These companies will provide fixed price projects to deliver solutions to buyer specifications.

4. Buy a ready-made service

I have no doubt that, like NDMC Consulting and introhive, there are other companies have entered the automotive market in the past few years thanks to the available of suitable tools to provide ready-made online services that deliver the outcomes needed without requiring dealers and motor manufacturers to build their own solutions.  The challenge facing providers is that each and every system will require heavy customization and tailoring.  Encanvas Remote[Spaces] is an example of a cloud architecture that enables every customer to enjoy their own individual and private cloud service.  Competing platforms like Interneer, Tibco Spotfire, Force.com and OutSystems (to mention a few) are no doubt able to offer a similar capability.

Summary

Cloud-based operational analytics solutions are growing in popularity as a way to extend the life of Dealer Management Systems investments.  They lever value from sleepy data held in administrative systems by finding smarter ways to turn data connections into new reasons to engage customers in dialogue.  These solutions do create a single version of the truth but in a different way; not by seeking to install another system, but instead by adding a value extracting capability in the cloud that gives dealer executives the actionable insights they need without the pain of yet another major IT project.

About This Series of KeyNote Articles on Customer Science in Motor Retail

How does Motor Retail benefit from applying operational analytical tools to source actionable insights?  In this series of keynote articles I explore how the coming together of mobile computing, innovations in customer science and advances in big data analysis are creating the perfect storm for marketers in motor retail.

Actionable Insights are those views of data that cause managers to ask new questions about how processes work and take action.  They differ from key performance measures and daily operating control (DOC) reports that focus on delivering a picture of progress against a strategic objective, operating budget or forecast.  What actionable insights can dealers expect to source from their Dealer Management Systems – and how do they source them?

...

Most motor retailers employ a Dealer Management System (DMS) to manage and administer all facets of their business operations.  The typical components of a Dealer Management System include Financials, Showroom and Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Parts, Service, Workshop Management, Point-of-Sale, Franchise Data, Vehicle Stock, Purchasing and Pricing Administration.

Many of the Dealer Management Systems that exist in the motor retail sector are proprietary systems and some of the technology employed dates back to the pre-noughties when the world had never heard of cloud computing and mobile phones were the size of a small brick.

The reason why the industry has been so slow to adopt change in IT has a lot to do with the complexity of the dealer information environment and the close synergies of the many operational areas that exist in a dealership.  As part of a tightly knit supply chain, dealers also need their systems to talk to the systems operated by the motor manufacturers.  These integrations are also complex, hard to create and adapt. Dealers ideally want to have a single information environment so to meet their need. This means software vendors have to invest hugely in attaining the ‘critical mass’ of capabilities the industry demands before they can hope to compete with incumbents.  This creates a natural barrier to new software vendor entrants hoping to enter the market.

The consequence of this market stagnation in viable competitive DMS options for major dealer groups means many are required to operate computer systems that are poor at sharing their data and exposing the actionable insights that dealer execs need.

In a market where competition is growing daily, dealers know they need to be much better at understanding the relationship with their customers, better at producing personalized offers that are event-driven, fine-grained and relevant, and better at finding more reasons to speak to customers that are ever more distant and only happy to engage with suppliers when it suits them.

Data Discovery from Dealer Management Systems

The quality and completeness of operational analytical tools found in Dealer Management Systems varies hugely.  Many of the younger software products include highly impressive reporting tools that are ideal for understanding the performance of pipelines and processes.  Where most dealer systems tend to fall down is their ability to source ‘holistic’ views of customer profiling, interaction and life-time value.

The essence of customer science is to gain a single page view of the customer that uncovers all aspects of the relationship including:

• Profile: Affluence, location, family status, employment, habits etc.
• Persona: What makes them ‘individual’
• Communication: Communications history, activities and preferences
• Driver behavior: How the customer drives their vehicle and the impact on vehicle depreciation and maintenance schedules
• Buying behavior: What do they buy, how do they buy, likes and dislikes; what sort of relationship do they want to have with their suppliers?
• Products: What vehicles do they have, like, have had previously?  What other products and services have they used, would they like?
• Life-time value: What is the potential value of business derived from this individual

Uncovering these insights is valuable – useful - but it’s only when these many attributes can be connected that the eureka moments occur and marketers and their customer service colleagues uncover the gold dust that makes their campaigns more effective and raises the bar on their customer experience.

As a general rule, Dealer Management Systems are designed to support the many key processes that exist within a motor dealership.  By analyzing generic capabilities of motor dealerships we now know there are approximately 136 major processes that occur within a motor dealership.  These are supplemented by close to 200 common reports and approximately 150 primary referencing tables.  You get the picture – it’s complicated.

When software applications are built for a purpose the data models that underpin them take on that form.  In the case of Dealer Management Systems that means that most data models are poorly designed and include the same tables time and again in different parts of the data structure for different reasons.  For example, the field ‘Country’ will appear in customer and supplier addresses.  It will also appear in delivery locations and other records.  But will there be a single table for ‘Countries’?  Probably not.

So what?

The implication of this confused data structure is that execs that want to see customer views by activity, service used, spend (etc.) won’t be able to easily source these views because the data will be held in many separate silos and in the wrong structures too.  It also means that dealers, when they look at the data, they won’t necessarily know if they’re examining a list of vehicles from the CRM system, or a similar list of vehicles from their Vehicle Stock Book.

Advances in ‘Actionable Insights’ Data Harvesting

The good news is that cloud computing has introduced smarter ways of harvesting and creating new views of data that remove the hit and miss complexity of constantly trying to mash views on a spreadsheet.  How it basically works is this:

1. Flat files reports (the type you produce on a spreadsheet with no pivot tables) are produced for each master process area.  These are designed to contain the magic fields that identify customers, vehicles, sales people, dealerships and other key identifiers.
2. These flat files are uploaded to a ‘sorting’ engine that normalizes the data, uncovers errors and brings the various flat files together in the form of a relational database ‘in the cloud’.  This new data structure is sometimes called a ‘data mart’ – not to be confused with a ‘data warehouse’ which is a much more rigid, pre-planned data architecture for preprocessing views of data. 
3. Once the data is onboarded, data connections are automatically generated between the various magic fields (i.e. primary key identifiers of the subject records) and it’s now possible to start performing queries on the data to create the actionable insights execs want to see.

The above summary ignores the fact that there’s a lot of data NOT on Dealer Management Systems that can enrich customer profiling systems and add fresh perspectives to analysis such as customer experience data, website clicks and interactions, finance company data, service plan data, SMS messaging inbound/outbound activity, mapping resources and consumer profiling data resources from third party vendors.

Federated operational insights systems like the one I describe are best placed to harvest data in this way and remove the complexity and cost of sourcing data from Dealer Management Systems.  A few words of warning however:

• This type of system does not displace the need for effective operational reporting within the process-centric tools that run the business, though these are increasingly well catered for by vendors
• Operational analytical systems are rarely able to feed data back into the Dealer Management System, although why you’d need to do this I struggle to understand.  I suspect most managers want a ‘single version of the truth’ for the data they look at but few people care if it resides on one system nowadays.

Key Technology Components

The good news is that cloud computing has introduced smarter ways of harvesting and creating new views of data that don’t require people to invest time manually authoring reports or playing with data in spreadsheets – and thank goodness because anyone that’s had to do it knows how boring and tiresome to task of manually aggregating and normalizing data can be! 

There are a few crucial technology innovations that have made this possible:

Web Server Apps

Popular platforms like the Microsoft Web Platform (comprising of modules including Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft ASP.NET and Microsoft IIS) are able to publish applications in a format that means they can be viewed on a browser without requiring any downloads and plug-ins to the computer device.  That means you can view applications using mobile phones, tablets, PCs, laptops and smart digital televisions provided you have suitable User Permissions to login. Users are assigned to User Groups and their access and usability permissions are governed by the permissions assigned to the group, or groups, they belong to.  In a 24/7 world, users can experience the Martini moment of – anytime, anyplace and anywhere computing without having to fuss with onboard apps.

Private-Cloud Infrastructure

Deploying hosting web server apps on a private-cloud infrastructure means that buyers don’t need to fuss about installing web servers and managing them.  It removes the burden of installing hardware and software applications; and managing them.  Private-clouds can be configured for each account (so that each account has their own dedicated database and resources), or alternatively clouds can be multi-tenant environments where customers share the computing resources of the host web server.

Data Flow Augmentation and Data Extract, Transform and Load (ETL)

Something has to engineer the automated uploading, normalization, transformation and workflow of data to the cloud environment.  The tooling to do this now is relatively common-place.  What this automated routine needs to do is to watch a folder and wait for reports to turn up, or automatically kick into life at a scheduled time, to then audit the content and coax the data into the technology equivalent of a food blender that will spit out ‘good data that fulfils the upload criteria’. 

One of the clever features of this ‘blob’ of technology is that it needs to be capable of dealing with iterative changes to successive uploads of the same reports.  Let me have a go at explaining this:

When you upload several reports to the data crunching engine in the cloud for the first time, all is good with the world because there’s nothing else up there.  Do it again and the data crunching engine needs to sift through the fresh upload of data and work out: (1) What data exists and hasn’t changed? (2) What data exists but has been updated? and (3) What new records have been added that need to be included?

This is a non-trivial challenge and is an important feature of the data crunching engine.  Otherwise, the next time data is uploaded it will result in duplicates and lots of confusion (not good!).

Operational Analytics Software

There are many different sorts of operational analytics software (see my summary article on http://www.business2community.com/business-intelligence/operational-analytics-best-software-for-sourcing-actionable-insights-0560328 for more details) but some kind of data visualization and reporting tool-kit is needed to make the most of the harvested data.

Combine these four attributes – web apps, private-cloud deployment, data flow augmentation/ETL software and operational analytics software – and you have the essential ingredients of an Actionable Insights system that can harvest data from your DMS without have to work hard to do it!

Purchasing Options

There is a wide spectrum of technology vendors able to provide either components or complete platforms for authoring operational insights systems capable of extracting data painlessly from a DMS. There are also companies out there that provide marketing, data cleansing and customer science services targeted towards serving the specific needs of the dealer market. 

When it comes to the computing platform itself, as I summarize above, any solution needs to manage data crunching (to get the data in the right shape and form) together with data visualization and reporting tooling to make sense of it.  These ingredients with then need to reside on a server somewhere; more commonly now on a private-cloud to prevent the need to manually install hardware and software.

Buyers have a range of sourcing options to consider and these include:

1. Build your own system by using a highly dexterous and enterprise scalable cloud platform

There are too many of these to cover all of them but examples include the obvious BIG names like Microsoft Azure, cloud.google.com/appengine, Force.com (from Salesforce.com), WebSphereClouds or Amazon Cloud.  These big cloud tool-kits make development much easier than it used to be and all of the major vendors are on-point when it comes to scalability, security and resilience.  Don’t expect to have a quick solution though because it takes time and effort to get solutions ‘tuned’ to suit your needs.  Nevertheless, once you’re done you should have a first-class system.

In the last few years we’ve also seen a proliferation of smaller, expert cloud app platform vendors like CloudFoundry, CloudAppStudio and ActiveState that make it easier to design and publish custom applications to secure cloud environments, often demanding lower skills overheads.  The challenge facing these vendors is to ensure they can offer sufficiently complete platform capabilities.  They need to satisfy customers that they’re able to go the last mile on developments: The last thing customers want is to find, after months of a development, that some capabilities are missing and they have to start over on a bigger platform like IBM WebSphere, Amazon Cloud Web Services or Microsoft Azure that profit from the many millions of R&D dollars that bigger vendors have at their disposal.

2. Buy breed tool-kits

Getting a solution up-and-running faster can be achieved by selecting best-of-breed components. Two will be necessary to ‘fast-track your development;

1. A platform for designing the apps you need and managing the cloud data crunching using platforms like Interneer, Encanvas and OutSystems that offer out-of-the-box tooling to meet the majority of needs.  All of these providers provide ‘low or no’ coding overhead to the task of authoring applications.  They also possess rich data connectivity and workflow features.
2. An overlaid expert analytics tool-kit like Qlikview, Tibco Spotfire, Tableau, Yellowfin, Birst, iDashboards, Jedox and Jaspersoft.  These providers offer data visualization, dashboarding and reporting tools.

Of course, the nature of competition means that if you ask any of these vendors they will probably say they can offer a complete solution ;-)

3. Pay someone to build it for you

There are many companies out there like CSC, CACI, Canon, US Tech Solutions, Wipro, TCS, PA Consulting and countless smaller industry expert companies like DealerSolutions, Nybble and Ambridge Consulting that specialize in the data centric custom applications authoring arena.  These companies will provide fixed price projects to deliver solutions to buyer specifications.

4. Buy a ready-made service

I have no doubt that, like NDMC Consulting and introhive, there are other companies have entered the automotive market in the past few years thanks to the available of suitable tools to provide ready-made online services that deliver the outcomes needed without requiring dealers and motor manufacturers to build their own solutions.  The challenge facing providers is that each and every system will require heavy customization and tailoring.  Encanvas Remote[Spaces] is an example of a cloud architecture that enables every customer to enjoy their own individual and private cloud service.  Competing platforms like Interneer, Tibco Spotfire, Force.com and OutSystems (to mention a few) are no doubt able to offer a similar capability.

Summary

Cloud-based operational analytics solutions are growing in popularity as a way to extend the life of Dealer Management Systems investments.  They lever value from sleepy data held in administrative systems by finding smarter ways to turn data connections into new reasons to engage customers in dialogue.  These solutions do create a single version of the truth but in a different way; not by seeking to install another system, but instead by adding a value extracting capability in the cloud that gives dealer executives the actionable insights they need without the pain of yet another major IT project.

About This Series of KeyNote Articles on Customer Science in Motor Retail

How does Motor Retail benefit from applying operational analytical tools to source actionable insights?  In this series of keynote articles I explore how the coming together of mobile computing, innovations in customer science and advances in big data analysis are creating the perfect storm for marketers in motor retail.

Actionable Insights are those views of data that cause managers to ask new questions about how processes work and take action.  They differ from key performance measures and daily operating control (DOC) reports that focus on delivering a picture of progress against a strategic objective, operating budget or forecast.  What actionable insights can dealers expect to source from mapping their customers – and is it worth it?

…

Maps are a fantastic tool in customer science and these days they’re very accessible to all sizes of dealership.   Maps are useful because they provide ANOTHER perspective on the customer relationship.  It’s quite remarkable what new actionable insights are derived by looking at map data and in this article I examine some of the ways dealers can put maps to work. 

Tools for Mapping Customers

Before I get started on describing the practical uses of maps for Motor Retail customer science, let me quickly summarize the sort of mapping tools that are out there that dealers can use.

The obvious ‘king of mapping services’ is Googlemaps.  It’s a great application to use not only because it has great looking maps that work well on practically any computing device but also because of the richness of third party data that’s accessible through Google.  Unfortunately, if you’re a business you have to pay to use Googlemaps so it’s not a cheap option (check out ‘Google Maps for Business’ for more details. Clever third party companies like Maptive make it easier to put your data on Googlemaps for people that don’t want to fuss with APIs and they include Googlemaps charges in their tariff.

Second on the list of mapping services is Bing Maps from Microsoft.  Bing is a reasonable attempt by Microsoft to be like Googlemaps.  It has swishy features like heat-mapping that are very useful for customer profiling and analysis.  The pricing model is again quite expensive for business users (difficult to explain too as there are so many wrinkles to the terms) but the big benefit of using Microsoft Bing Maps is the fact it integrates very easily for .NET developers with the other apps they’re probably using.

Another couple of options not to be ignored are Yahoo! Maps (yep Yahoo! Does mapping too) and MapQuest who provide a chargeable mapping service – but there again, none of the online tools are free to businesses, so you will have to pay ‘something’ to map your own data.

One of the challenges of using online mapping services like Google, Bing and Yahoo! is that you’re never quite sure whether it’s safe to add your own customer data to the maps or, if you do, whether you’ll ever be able to download it and get it back.  Vendors will typically charge for meta-data created by their system including the geo-code!!  That’s probably why vendors like eSpatial and Squork Maps have entered the market.  They charge a flat fee for use of their mapping services, but you know when you publish your own data to a map that it’s safe. They also don’t add charges on for exporting data with geo-data or resources sourced by their platforms. Naturally anyone wishing to do upload customer data – even when it’s being uploaded to a dedicated private-cloud - would be wise to make sure they’re up-to-speed with Information Security policies and protocols surrounding use of personally identifiable data.  In the UK it’s important that dealers adhere to the common sense rules of the Data Protection Act while in Europe there is similar legislation in place - see Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights; Directive 95/46/EC – the Data Protection Directive.

An alternative to subscribing to a third party mapping service – and having to do all of the legwork yourself of getting your customer data on a map – is to find a technology or marketing partner that knows how to do it and have them effectively provide the service and the technology platform for you.  It’s likely you already know of a marketing agency, web design agency, DMS provider or technology partner that knows how to do this and can simply serve up your customer data on a map.  At NDMC, we include mapping into our Actionable Insights and Lead Generator software platforms as standard because we know how useful it is for customers to use maps in their business.

How the process of mapping customers works

There are a number of ways to plot customers on maps.  These are the most popular:

Postcodes – The quality of postcodes varies from one country to the next.  In the UK postcodes are highly accurate and take you to within a few houses of the exact pen position of the customers. Systems like Encanvas Maps integrate with Dealer Management Systems to automatically publish customer postcodes on a map via a simple upload report.  This means if you have accurate postcodes, the customer data will instantly appear on the map!  In many countries however, including the United States of America and South Africa, the accuracy of postcodes is not great and so a street address is needed to create an accurate customer map.

Address – Some mapping applications like Googlemaps are so advanced that they can plot customers based on address data.

Longitude and Latitude – Whilst the entire world used Longitude and Latitude geo-codes to plot places on a map, it’s not easy to obtain longlat details for customer records.  Some third party agencies offer services to source and apply these geo-codes to records but the process is expensive and it’s not easy to find a supplier as it’s quite specialist.

Eastings and Northings – In the UK, Ordnance Survey and many other public authorities adopt a geo-coding approach based on Easting and Northing coordinates.  Where data exists on customers based on Eastings and Northings, it can easily be applied to Ordnance Survey maps – but it’s quite difficult to source customer data with this attribute.

Manual Plotting – If you have no other option you can manually plot point on many of the geo-spatial applications and mapping services.  This is time consuming and risks inaccurate manual entry of locations.

Extracting value from maps for customer science - It’s all about data connections!

When dealers start to analyze their customer data in order to begin the journey of understanding what matters most to their customers through profiling and persona building, it soon becomes obvious that the more information you can access about customers, the richer the picture becomes.  Building an understanding of customers is about connecting the dots in your data.

There are some obvious ‘dots’:

• Affluence and life-style – Spending power; Whether they are married or single, own their own property or live with parents, retired, employed, unemployed etc.
• Locations – Where customers live; where they shop; where they work; where customers are now
• Interaction behaviors – How customers prefer to communicate
• Buyer behaviors – How customers pay for products and services; What sort of relationship they want with their dealership and aftersales providers; What options they consider
• Driver behaviors – How customers drive their vehicle
• Purchasing behaviors – What customers buy; Why they buy what they buy

Location-awareness is an important connecting line between the dots.  With maps marketers can better understand where their customers are and this can reveal affluence, risk, likelihood of seeing an advert and many other profiling characteristics.  Combine maps with profiling data and suddenly it’s possible to understand where your best customers are, where the worst customers are – and if we turn the table upside down, where the addressable market of ‘potential’ best customers are!

A few examples of the actionable insights that maps can uncover

Here are a few scenarios that are typical of what happens when you map your customer data. 

Actionable Insights that Drive Data Quality Enrichment and Qualify Size of Addressable Market – Plot postcodes on a map and you’ll be amazed how many end up in the sea! 

Actionable Insights that Drive Data Quality Enrichment and Qualify Size of Addressable Market – Send customer data off to a consumer data company like Experis, Equifax, TransUnion or www.improvemydata.com and they can assign an affluence (Cameo) profile to your customer database.  Once your data is cleansed you can also source data on similar profiles within your territory to qualify the addressable market in your region.

Actionable Insights that Drive Marketing Campaigns – Plot customers on a map and filter by type of service, buying behavior, which customers haven’t had a service from your dealership and see where the customers are located.  Then, create a campaign selecting customers from the map and outputting them as a data list.

Actionable Insights that Drive Operating Efficiency – Plot customers on a map to qualify how best to arrange collections and deliveries.  

Actionable Insights that Drive Advertising Returns – Plot customers on a map and find locations where they’re most likely to view advertisements and events.

The examples above are a snapshot of the use cases employed by dealerships.  If you have other examples I’d be very interested to hear about them!

Actionable Insights are those views of data that cause managers to ask new questions about how processes work and take action.  They differ from key performance measures and daily operating control (DOC) reports that focus on delivering a picture of progress against a strategic objective, operating budget or forecast.  What actionable insights can dealers expect to source from mapping their customers – and is it worth it?

…

Maps are a fantastic tool in customer science and these days they’re very accessible to all sizes of dealership.   Maps are useful because they provide ANOTHER perspective on the customer relationship.  It’s quite remarkable what new actionable insights are derived by looking at map data and in this article I examine some of the ways dealers can put maps to work. 

Tools for Mapping Customers

Before I get started on describing the practical uses of maps for Motor Retail customer science, let me quickly summarize the sort of mapping tools that are out there that dealers can use.

The obvious ‘king of mapping services’ is Googlemaps.  It’s a great application to use not only because it has great looking maps that work well on practically any computing device but also because of the richness of third party data that’s accessible through Google.  Unfortunately, if you’re a business you have to pay to use Googlemaps so it’s not a cheap option (check out ‘Google Maps for Business’ for more details. Clever third party companies like Maptive make it easier to put your data on Googlemaps for people that don’t want to fuss with APIs and they include Googlemaps charges in their tariff.

Second on the list of mapping services is Bing Maps from Microsoft.  Bing is a reasonable attempt by Microsoft to be like Googlemaps.  It has swishy features like heat-mapping that are very useful for customer profiling and analysis.  The pricing model is again quite expensive for business users (difficult to explain too as there are so many wrinkles to the terms) but the big benefit of using Microsoft Bing Maps is the fact it integrates very easily for .NET developers with the other apps they’re probably using.

Another couple of options not to be ignored are Yahoo! Maps (yep Yahoo! Does mapping too) and MapQuest who provide a chargeable mapping service – but there again, none of the online tools are free to businesses, so you will have to pay ‘something’ to map your own data.

One of the challenges of using online mapping services like Google, Bing and Yahoo! is that you’re never quite sure whether it’s safe to add your own customer data to the maps or, if you do, whether you’ll ever be able to download it and get it back.  Vendors will typically charge for meta-data created by their system including the geo-code!!  That’s probably why vendors like eSpatial and Squork Maps have entered the market.  They charge a flat fee for use of their mapping services, but you know when you publish your own data to a map that it’s safe. They also don’t add charges on for exporting data with geo-data or resources sourced by their platforms. Naturally anyone wishing to do upload customer data – even when it’s being uploaded to a dedicated private-cloud - would be wise to make sure they’re up-to-speed with Information Security policies and protocols surrounding use of personally identifiable data.  In the UK it’s important that dealers adhere to the common sense rules of the Data Protection Act while in Europe there is similar legislation in place - see Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights; Directive 95/46/EC – the Data Protection Directive.

An alternative to subscribing to a third party mapping service – and having to do all of the legwork yourself of getting your customer data on a map – is to find a technology or marketing partner that knows how to do it and have them effectively provide the service and the technology platform for you.  It’s likely you already know of a marketing agency, web design agency, DMS provider or technology partner that knows how to do this and can simply serve up your customer data on a map.  At NDMC, we include mapping into our Actionable Insights and Lead Generator software platforms as standard because we know how useful it is for customers to use maps in their business.

How the process of mapping customers works

There are a number of ways to plot customers on maps.  These are the most popular:

Postcodes – The quality of postcodes varies from one country to the next.  In the UK postcodes are highly accurate and take you to within a few houses of the exact pen position of the customers. Systems like Encanvas Maps integrate with Dealer Management Systems to automatically publish customer postcodes on a map via a simple upload report.  This means if you have accurate postcodes, the customer data will instantly appear on the map!  In many countries however, including the United States of America and South Africa, the accuracy of postcodes is not great and so a street address is needed to create an accurate customer map.

Address – Some mapping applications like Googlemaps are so advanced that they can plot customers based on address data.

Longitude and Latitude – Whilst the entire world used Longitude and Latitude geo-codes to plot places on a map, it’s not easy to obtain longlat details for customer records.  Some third party agencies offer services to source and apply these geo-codes to records but the process is expensive and it’s not easy to find a supplier as it’s quite specialist.

Eastings and Northings – In the UK, Ordnance Survey and many other public authorities adopt a geo-coding approach based on Easting and Northing coordinates.  Where data exists on customers based on Eastings and Northings, it can easily be applied to Ordnance Survey maps – but it’s quite difficult to source customer data with this attribute.

Manual Plotting – If you have no other option you can manually plot point on many of the geo-spatial applications and mapping services.  This is time consuming and risks inaccurate manual entry of locations.

Extracting value from maps for customer science - It’s all about data connections!

When dealers start to analyze their customer data in order to begin the journey of understanding what matters most to their customers through profiling and persona building, it soon becomes obvious that the more information you can access about customers, the richer the picture becomes.  Building an understanding of customers is about connecting the dots in your data.

There are some obvious ‘dots’:

• Affluence and life-style – Spending power; Whether they are married or single, own their own property or live with parents, retired, employed, unemployed etc.
• Locations – Where customers live; where they shop; where they work; where customers are now
• Interaction behaviors – How customers prefer to communicate
• Buyer behaviors – How customers pay for products and services; What sort of relationship they want with their dealership and aftersales providers; What options they consider
• Driver behaviors – How customers drive their vehicle
• Purchasing behaviors – What customers buy; Why they buy what they buy

Location-awareness is an important connecting line between the dots.  With maps marketers can better understand where their customers are and this can reveal affluence, risk, likelihood of seeing an advert and many other profiling characteristics.  Combine maps with profiling data and suddenly it’s possible to understand where your best customers are, where the worst customers are – and if we turn the table upside down, where the addressable market of ‘potential’ best customers are!

A few examples of the actionable insights that maps can uncover

Here are a few scenarios that are typical of what happens when you map your customer data. 

Actionable Insights that Drive Data Quality Enrichment and Qualify Size of Addressable Market – Plot postcodes on a map and you’ll be amazed how many end up in the sea! 

Actionable Insights that Drive Data Quality Enrichment and Qualify Size of Addressable Market – Send customer data off to a consumer data company like Experis, Equifax, TransUnion or www.improvemydata.com and they can assign an affluence (Cameo) profile to your customer database.  Once your data is cleansed you can also source data on similar profiles within your territory to qualify the addressable market in your region.

Actionable Insights that Drive Marketing Campaigns – Plot customers on a map and filter by type of service, buying behavior, which customers haven’t had a service from your dealership and see where the customers are located.  Then, create a campaign selecting customers from the map and outputting them as a data list.

Actionable Insights that Drive Operating Efficiency – Plot customers on a map to qualify how best to arrange collections and deliveries.  

Actionable Insights that Drive Advertising Returns – Plot customers on a map and find locations where they’re most likely to view advertisements and events.

The examples above are a snapshot of the use cases employed by dealerships.  If you have other examples I’d be very interested to hear about them!

Customer Science - ...building deeper, richer, more personalized customer experiences by applying customer insights to better understand what customers care about, how they think and act, how they make buying decisions, how they want suppliers to communicate with them, how they want to be treated, what they expect from their suppliers... and more.  But does it work (is it working?) in  Motor Retail? Is it being used successfully to turn 'sleepy customer data' into a dynamo for new reasons to speak to customers, turning clicks and visits into cash? 

...

Since the 1980's I've watched with interest as the methods adopted by marketers to engage customers and prospects have adapted as new technologies and created approaches have come of age.  More than in any era before, the noughties has required marketers to take on a cacophony of new techniques to engage customers that want the perfect mix of a personalized customer service experience and relevant, timely offers while not wanting to be barraged by suppliers with direct marketing and unwanted contact.  The growing impact of the Internet, mobile communications, social networking and a more techno savvy customer communities is changing the rules for marketers on how to get the biggest impact from their marketing spend.

By now, the marketing industry has worked out that it's vital to gather information on customers 'as part of the day job' to build up a profile and persona on each and every customer so the customer enjoys a personalized 'shopping' experience.  Companies like Tesco and Amazon have shown the way in exploiting customer data to sensitively give shoppers what they want rather than forcing them with a strong hand down paths they don't necessarily want to follow.

The type of relationship customers want - location-centric, timely, fine-grained, event-driven offers personalized to their particular wants and preferences - can only be achieved in my opinion by taking every opportunity to learn about customers through each and every interaction.  Customers don't want to be contacted out of the blue, or left standing in service receptions JUST SO THAT DEALER CAN CAPTURE DATA TO SELL TO THEM.  For Motor Dealerships that means not only investing time into collecting data 'as part of the day job' but also investing in the PROCESS of 'digital persona-lization'.

In an odd way, customers generally WANT suppliers to build and know their digital persona because they want that type of personalized experience (with the suppliers they want to buy from).  What they definitely DON'T WANT however are relationships with suppliers that abuse their trust or over-bite on the level of relationship they want. 

Marketers in most industries profile their customers these days, but 'Customer Sciences' are only now appearing in the Motor Retail sector.  This is partly no doubt down to the fact that in certain countries and regions, dealerships with the right franchise have very little local competition for the brand they promote. While it's always silly to generalize, the feedback I get is that this is changing and levels of competition are growing in most geographies.

Understandably, dealer principles want to know:

• How does profiling help me to sell more?
• How do I build up profiles and personas from my data?
• How do I enrich my data when it's poor?
• How do I channel dialogue opportunities to encourage sales people to engage customers at the right time and for the right reasons?
• Where do I start?

The best way to start the journey towards Customer Science based marketing methods like profile and persona building is to perform an audit of the 'net present state' of your customer insights and the extent to which your dealership is exploiting its dealer insights. 

NDMC (and again, I'm sure there are other supplier companies out there) offer a 'CRM Diagnostic' service and system.  This is a one-time reporting cycle where key data is extracted from existing DMS and administrative systems to a secure space, where it is cleansed, normalized, analyzed, and then - from the connections made in the Customer Science Engine - out pops a series of online (still secure) 'drill-downable' reports and views.  This type of diagnostic service will qualify how complete and consistent the customer data is, and the number of 'meaningful reasons to engage customers' against what the dealership should be capable of based on the size and characteristics of their customer database.

- ends -

Customer Science - ...building deeper, richer, more personalized customer experiences by applying customer insights to better understand what customers care about, how they think and act, how they make buying decisions, how they want suppliers to communicate with them, how they want to be treated, what they expect from their suppliers... and more.  But does it work (is it working?) in  Motor Retail? Is it being used successfully to turn 'sleepy customer data' into a dynamo for new reasons to speak to customers, turning clicks and visits into cash? 

...

Since the 1980's I've watched with interest as the methods adopted by marketers to engage customers and prospects have adapted as new technologies and created approaches have come of age.  More than in any era before, the noughties has required marketers to take on a cacophony of new techniques to engage customers that want the perfect mix of a personalized customer service experience and relevant, timely offers while not wanting to be barraged by suppliers with direct marketing and unwanted contact.  The growing impact of the Internet, mobile communications, social networking and a more techno savvy customer communities is changing the rules for marketers on how to get the biggest impact from their marketing spend.

By now, the marketing industry has worked out that it's vital to gather information on customers 'as part of the day job' to build up a profile and persona on each and every customer so the customer enjoys a personalized 'shopping' experience.  Companies like Tesco and Amazon have shown the way in exploiting customer data to sensitively give shoppers what they want rather than forcing them with a strong hand down paths they don't necessarily want to follow.

The type of relationship customers want - location-centric, timely, fine-grained, event-driven offers personalized to their particular wants and preferences - can only be achieved in my opinion by taking every opportunity to learn about customers through each and every interaction.  Customers don't want to be contacted out of the blue, or left standing in service receptions JUST SO THAT DEALER CAN CAPTURE DATA TO SELL TO THEM.  For Motor Dealerships that means not only investing time into collecting data 'as part of the day job' but also investing in the PROCESS of 'digital persona-lization'.

In an odd way, customers generally WANT suppliers to build and know their digital persona because they want that type of personalized experience (with the suppliers they want to buy from).  What they definitely DON'T WANT however are relationships with suppliers that abuse their trust or over-bite on the level of relationship they want. 

Marketers in most industries profile their customers these days, but 'Customer Sciences' are only now appearing in the Motor Retail sector.  This is partly no doubt down to the fact that in certain countries and regions, dealerships with the right franchise have very little local competition for the brand they promote. While it's always silly to generalize, the feedback I get is that this is changing and levels of competition are growing in most geographies.

Understandably, dealer principles want to know:

• How does profiling help me to sell more?
• How do I build up profiles and personas from my data?
• How do I enrich my data when it's poor?
• How do I channel dialogue opportunities to encourage sales people to engage customers at the right time and for the right reasons?
• Where do I start?

The best way to start the journey towards Customer Science based marketing methods like profile and persona building is to perform an audit of the 'net present state' of your customer insights and the extent to which your dealership is exploiting its dealer insights. 

NDMC (and again, I'm sure there are other supplier companies out there) offer a 'CRM Diagnostic' service and system.  This is a one-time reporting cycle where key data is extracted from existing DMS and administrative systems to a secure space, where it is cleansed, normalized, analyzed, and then - from the connections made in the Customer Science Engine - out pops a series of online (still secure) 'drill-downable' reports and views.  This type of diagnostic service will qualify how complete and consistent the customer data is, and the number of 'meaningful reasons to engage customers' against what the dealership should be capable of based on the size and characteristics of their customer database.

- ends -