I was getting ready to write a blog about "Mobile-First," because I had a hunch that mobile phones are everywhere. Well, I cannot claim it is a hunch any longer because when you look around everybody has a mobile phone and more specifically a smartphone. So, I started doing some research and the data blew me away. Between the ages of 19 and 49, 94% of this population in the USA have smartphones.

Yes, that number is 94%! (1)

Well if that is the case, wouldn't rational logic dictate that we start by making sure every digital interaction is mobile friendly? It makes sense as mobile communications lead all other forms of communication. I ask you honestly, as dealer principals, owners, general managers, and service directors, how many of you have gone to your website and tried to perform the functions that you need to perform as a consumer to buy a car or schedule service for your car, or get a tow truck for your car? I think you would be very surprised. And not in a good sort of way!

Everybody goes to their smartphone from time to time and looks at their website to see how it behaves or to answer a question. But one of the big interaction points most people forget, that is initiated from the mobile phone, is texting. Text communications have become prevalent. So, it's not good enough to just have websites that are mobile responsive, they also need to be communications friendly.

Yes, mobile websites have to be communications friendly including all forms of mobile communications and texting communications!  Mobile-first web design is vital.

By that I mean you should be able to text or call from any page on the website, and the text/call has to be intelligently routed depending on which page you are on. The text (because you know the phone number of the mobile phone) should be routed to the right person, depending on whether or not that individual has some sort of an issue open. If a person calls it should be routed to the right person that is currently handling their case. Although, based on our experience, if you made texting truly easy and intelligent on your mobile website, your call volume would drop significantly!

I propose a very simple measure. If you do this exercise honestly and get 80% or higher you are on the right path. Even if there is scope for improvement you would have a mobile-first friendly site that users would like to use. 

Additionally, you can add dimensions like “Easy to Find,” and “Clarity of page,” but for now I think this is a good starting point. 

Each measure is given 1 point and the ability to call is given a 50% weightage, as consumers do not really like to call because they are too busy to be “put on hold.”

 If you are below 80%, please call in your webmaster and get to work!

 For some of you who may not know what a “responsive” web page is, please look at the images below as an example. One shows how it appears on a desktop, the other on a mobile device. The same mobile webpage when viewed on a desktop shows up in landscape mode and fills a large monitor. However, it will also sense a mobile device and reformat itself to portrait mode and stack the text and images on top of each other for easy readability:

Desktop

Mobile

1 https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/mobile/

Today's Environment

Do you ever get fed up with the chatbots that keep appearing on websites even after you have shut them down?  Well, many websites could use some chatbot best practices! That is just one of several things I find that need to be fixed on dealer websites to improve the consumer experience.

I don't know how many of you have gone and tried to navigate your dealer website. In many cases it is confusing and an absolute nightmare. It is important to realize that most consumers now access websites on their mobile phones. So, the real estate on your website is extremely valuable!

There's an easy trick you can use to see how it would appear if you were looking at the website on your mobile. One method is to access your website using your mobile phone, but if you are on your desktop, and are using Chrome, you can right-click anywhere on the website and select Inspect. Then, on the top left-hand corner, you'll see an icon with two small rectangles, one on top of the other. When you click on this icon you can simulate mobile websites and cycle through many different iPhone and Android phones!

Anything that pops on the desktop screen is hard to present on a mobile device and is likely to confuse the consumer.

What has history taught us?

I don't know if you all are old enough to remember how Google initially displaced Yahoo as the leading search engine. Look at the images below.

Consumers who grew up with Google’s website knew they only had a few choices and doing searches was super quick and easy.  By contrast, the leader's, (Yahoo) website was cluttered and not very functional.  In this new day and age with COVID-19 and an emphasis on digital interactions, my recommendation is that we need to take a radical approach and de-clutter our websites.  I would urge the Dealer Advisory Councils to advise their manufacturers that the new look and feel of dealership websites needs to be simple and very functional, as there are only three things that a customer wants to do when they visit:

Buy a new/used car

Create an appointment for service

Talk to the dealer staff for anything else.  

If not, sites like Carvana (see below) will be the consumers' choice for buying cars and in the future, these retailers will expand into service too. Notice how Carvana gives you only 2 choices and for everything else they allow you to chat with them.  This is where a chat box on the website does make sense!

If you look at their mobile website, it seems that their site is truly Responsive. This term describes a website that will rearrange the panels when you go from a desktop to a mobile phone, so the website does not need to be built twice. For the modern consumer, your website has to be Responsive.

One idea for the future:

If you do want to put communications options on your website, make sure that the communications are context-aware. So, if you are on a card for a new vehicle, and you click on Call or Chat, the context of where you are on the website should be totally clear to the recipient of the call or the chat. Look at the image below. Again, I urge dealers to de-content their website and leave only those things that are absolutely necessary to bring the customer closer to you.

Moral of the story: “Make it easy for the customer!!”

When automobiles were first introduced into society, people didn’t know what to think. For the most part, early automobiles were reserved for the wealthy, while everyone else continued their transportation needs with the use of horse and carriage.

However, people were very curious about this strange new phenomenon of transportation. So curious, in fact, that cars were exhibited not at the car shows we know of today, but rather at circuses alongside elephants, the wolf boy and other curiosities of delight, according to the book, “The Evolution from Horse to Automobile.”

Change can certainly be hard to confront. The mass transition from horse-powered transportation to automobiles took about 50 years, according to the president and managing director of General Motors Canada. In a recent article he shared that horses, while loved by both consumers and industry, caused significant environmental and economic challenges. Their use grew to such an extent that they produced a huge volume of manure, creating flies and traffic congestion on unpaved roads. They also consumed massive quantities of natural resources; five acres each of hay and grain annually.

It was calculated that, if left untouched, horse droppings on the streets in North America alone would rise to the level of a third-story building in Manhattan; that’s about thirty feet! This perfectly illustrates the predicament, and catalyst, that led to the rush development of more gas-powered vehicles. This has continued today into electric, self-driving and autonomous vehicles. Consider the mass expulsion of emissions as the 1920 equivalent of horse-droppings. The only difference being that emissions aren’t right in front of you drawing flies. Emissions do, however, have a similar (or worse) impact on the environment and health in the form of smog.

Change is difficult. I get that. That’s why it took 50 years to migrate from horses to automobiles.

But, in these modern times, technologies develop much faster than in the past. I’d bet you anything that the majority of you have a computer that’s already outdated. Even if you bought it 6 months ago!

The point I am making here is that change is inevitable. It is far better to embrace it then to resist it. In the automotive industry, we do tend to be a bit behind the rest of retail as far as jumping on the technology bandwagon. While there will always be a population of people working to slow progress by making a case for how any new technology will not work, those dealers that embrace and use new technologies see huge benefits and tend to stay ahead of their competition.

One very simple example is texting. Just about everyone has a smartphone these days and that adoption started only eleven years ago with the iPhone launch. Voicemail is now considered very inefficient as it is so much easier to communicate with customers via methods they use frequently, such as text messages. Some dealers have seen dollars per RO increase substantially simply due to better interaction with their customers through the ability to text. It makes economic sense to simply adjust to how consumers prefer to communicate in today’s smartphone world. Remember what it was like when most people didn’t even own a cell phone, let alone a smartphone?

New and developing technologies and the evolution to autonomous vehicles will most certainly benefit society. But there is always someone that argues against any new technology, perhaps believing that SkyNet from the movie “The Terminator” is soon to follow.

 Auto manufacturers are shifting their focuses to low-emissions, electric and autonomous vehicles. Worldwide OEM investment in electric vehicles is expected to be around $90 billion through 2030 and another $61 billion will be spent through 2025, continuing the development of autonomous vehicles. Technology companies, such as Google’s Waymo, etc., are moving forward at a more rapid pace. And, regulators are throwing environmental rules, guidelines and – more telling – strict deadlines at dealers and OEMs.

The transportation industry as we know it is going through a huge evolution similar to that difficult migration from horses to automobiles. Except this time, it won’t take as long, or at least I don’t think it will. But perhaps I am wrong – what do you think and what challenges will this present?

Have any of you had success with QR Codes? By some reports they are making a comeback. But, on the other side of the coin, on an episode of Shark Tank late last year, renowned venture investor Chris Sacca commented that QR codes are “the herpes of mobile technology.”

Yes, pretty harsh, but his words, not mine!

Technology is sometimes a fickle thing. In 1994, a company named Denso Wave created QR codes. Marketers were excited as this was an interactive and easy way to pass information onto the consumer. An interesting aside is that, according to an article on Gizmodo, Denso Wave was owned by Toyota and this technology was initially used to “track vehicles as they were assembled and to scan components at high speed.”

Over the years auto dealers have wavered on the use of QR codes as most consumers disliked the difficult process of scanning them. According to ComScore, by December 2011, seventeen years after their introduction, only 20 percent of Americans, 16 percent of Canadians, and 12 percent of Spanish and UK smartphone owners used QR codes at all, as they were far from user friendly. Cell phones required a QR code reader application and those were also hard to use. To compound the inconvenience, the smartphone needed a data signal. And, it wasn’t that long ago that many cell phone plans limited data usage and consumers were careful with their data. As a result, the QR code promptly lost its popularity with consumers and, if consumers weren’t interested, marketers certainly were not!

But now, it appears, QR codes are making a comeback. The question is “why?”

As smartphone technology and software has evolved, cell phone manufacturers are again looking at the benefits of QR codes. Marketers always need simple and effective ways to quickly and easily convey a lot of information to consumers. As the smartphone is still the best venue for that, phone manufacturers responded.

Two operating systems; Apple’s iOS and Android, account for 99.9% of all cell phones sold last year – a whopping 1.5 billion. As of Apple’s current iOS 11, all iPhones have the capability to scan QR codes simply by pointing the phone’s camera – no app required. And, from the iPhone 5s on up, all iPhones can run iOS 11 and, well, Apple pretty much forces an upgrade.

Each Android phone running Marshmallow and above (which is most of them) has the same ability to simply scan QR codes. So, as of right now, pretty much every phone sold has the native ability to scan QR codes built right into it, making QR codes less of a hassle and easier for consumers to use. Add in the fact that most cell phone providers now offer unlimited data, and that marketers, including dealers and OEMs, still need a way to convey large sums of information in relatively little space, and there is certainly something here to support the possibility that QR codes could make a comeback.

But, as with most technology, all is not golden. Chris Sacca has made it very clear that he sees no future in QR Codes. Perhaps he was referring to them being visually ugly and confusing for most users. He went on to say that: “the user experience sucks … it should be as simple as: buy some stuff, get a ride … period. Please, light the QR codes on fire.” And this is the guy that invested in seed and early-stage technology companies such as Twitter, Uber, Instagram, Twilio, and Kickstarter, investments that resulted in his placement as No. 2 on Forbes' Midas List: Top Tech Investors for 2017, so he seems to be a skilled predictor of trends technology-wise.

This certainly presents an interesting situation. Apple and Android predict a comeback for QR codes as a low-cost way for merchants to interact with the consumer’s device. However, a key thought leader thinks otherwise.

I would be interested in hearing your thoughts on this. Will QR codes make a comeback as mobile providers have simplified the process? Are they now, in fact, an efficient way to provide customers with rich information about a vehicle – new or used – without having to stock hundreds of boxes of brochures? Or, is Sacca right, and consumers have lost interest due to past bad experiences and should the technology be set on fire? Or, lastly, is there perhaps some middle ground where QR code technology needs further improvement before it is truly a useful tool for both dealers and consumers?

Do you think retail is changing, or do you believe that continuing to do the same thing will allow you to prosper as you have for decades? Certainly, the auto industry disruptors must be a wake-up call, at the very least. But is it enough of a wake-up call? We’re watching entire industries pretty much go out of business or forced into radical change because of companies that come in and offer consumers better and more convenient experiences. Look at the entertainment industry: Amazon, Netflix, and YouTube are now major production companies that create original content.

This content is winning Oscars and have put all the “classic” content producers into radical change mode as their old business strengths have become weakness. Amazon is such a powerhouse that its foray into the grocery store industry has become a full-on attack, with the acquisition of Whole Foods. Now, it’s even dipping its toes into the banking industry. And we have already seen their experiments with the auto industry; is “Amazon Auto” going to become reality sooner rather than later?

Where does it end and why are they continuously able to accomplish these things? Well, some businesses, especially those that have been around a long-time, get a little too comfortable and complacent in their position - until it’s too late.

This is causing retail chains that were staples not so long ago to shed off some of their retail locations. Rite-Aid just transferred 1,651 stores to pharmaceutical and retail competitor Walgreens. Times are tough in retail and industry disruptors are finding customer experience holes and taking advantage of them with lots of funding.

In fact, it’s such a hot topic that Bloomberg recently came out with a retro video game challenging people to keep a retail shopping mall alive. Want to play it and see how you do? Go ahead right here.

While not impossible to win, it is certainly challenging by all reports. But that’s the point, isn’t it?

The retail industry is experiencing the most fundamental and dramatic change since the industrial revolution. Technology helps just about every area of our lives and consumers are voting with their wallets for convenience and efficiency.

Unless you evolve your dealership alongside these retail giants who are, at the moment, winning the game, you might find yourself obsolete. While the retail automotive industry – especially franchise dealers – has been relatively shielded by franchise laws, that may not always be the case.

It will inevitably be consumers who decide whether the rules stay the same or change. Uber and Lyft are already changing the rules, it won’t matter if franchise laws exist when personal ownership drops off a cliff because it’s cheaper to buy rides than own a vehicle in an urban area.

Check out the ongoing drop in teen driver licenses being issued in this article. From 1996 to 2015 the share of High School seniors with a driver’s license dropped from 85.3% to a record low of 71.5%, and those are statistics from before Uber and Lyft became household names. Lawmakers will listen to their constituents eventually, so even protection by franchise laws will eventually erode.

Listen and act on your customer demands as far as the customer experience, technology and efficiency… or wait until another company comes along that will. The money is flowing in the direction of the disrupters, not the dealers or retail businesses.

And that should be a pretty big red flag for any retail business. Including dealerships.

Much progress has been made in the journey towards paperless transactions. We can now sign tax returns online; sign electronic pads at many retailers when using credit cards; and, in some cases, receipts are even emailed to us. When FedEx or UPS make deliveries we no longer sign a paper log, but a mobile electronic pad.

So, why is the automotive industry not doing this?

Despite the many new technologies now available to car dealers that enable electronic signatures, customers are still forced through a trillion signatures and countless initials (front and back, mind you) to complete a transaction -- EVEN IF the dealership has adopted e-signature technologies.

Think how frustrating, confusing and, frankly, distressing that is for the consumer. Imagine going to a retailer to make a purchase, inserting your credit card and signing the electronic pad, only to have the cash register spit out a paper receipt which you then also must sign. My first reaction would be, “why do I need to sign this PAPER receipt when I just signed my name on your e-signature pad?” Well, that is exactly the experience dealers are providing to their customers. Whether this is happening in finance or service, it doesn’t matter.

I do understand that some state regulatory bodies, such as the Bureau of Automotive Repair (BAR) in California, require physical documents with original signatures. Whereas the federal statute allows for e-signatures, which is why you can buy a home without a single wet signature.  

Is this dated system required in our industry because dealers are not bothering to challenge it, or is it because the local enforcer (such as the BAR rep) claims it is necessary?  Regardless, I also know that this level of redundancy is so irritating that some dealers refuse to comply. For the sake of the customer’s experience, they allow customers to just sign electronically; willing to face any fines or lawsuits that may (but probably won’t) come back around. Not that I recommend going against any laws, I am just illustrating how frustrating this is for dealers – and their customers.

We’re at the point where the Federal government now accepts e-signatures, and many state governments have jumped on board. E-signatures are acceptable enough for credit card companies and financial institutions. You can even deposit a check via your cell phone! Yet, here we are in the automotive industry still wasting reams of paper on a single automotive transaction.

While we may all be nodding our heads in agreement with fully paperless transactions, we continue to demand the redundant paper signature -- even while adopting e-signatures! This just confuses customers and forces dealerships to continuously find storage facilities for the decades worth of documents that could easily fit on a single hard drive. Think of the storage costs, shredding costs, wasted time, effort and customer frustration. And let’s not forget the environmental impact of all that paper -- all while our ecologically-friendly governments, states, counties, cities, communities, neighbors and family members encourage us to use less paper and preserve the environment.

Does this sound like progress to you?

myKaarma CEO/Founder Ujj Nath explains why conventional marketing techniques are not working to engage consumers any longer.

According to a recent article in AutoRemarketing, a study by J.D. Power found that customers are overwhelmingly more loyal, and will return for service, to dealerships that communicate with them well and take the lead in the communication process.

The study found both phone contact and texting increased customer loyalty. Among customers who are contacted by phone, 55 percent say they “definitely will” return for paid service. When receiving text message updates, that loyalty factor jumped to 67 percent.

Customers simply want to know what’s going on with their vehicle – not after the fact but during the whole process. And they want the dealer to stay in communication with them throughout the service process. Service advisors are busy people and, unless your dealership employs a full time staff member to continuously attempt to contact customers with status updates over the phone, you’ll probably find it tough to accomplish.

For the most part, dealerships stick to the form of communication that they’re used to – telephone. While telephones certainly play a part in the communication chain, texting and e-mail can also be effective ways to reach customers. In fact, I have found that a combination of communication methods is the most effective.

It’s tough to get a $500 repair order approved via text, as explaining the value of the recommendations to the customer is typically necessary, which is almost impossible via text.

You can, however, relay simple status updates regularly and/or ask simple questions via text.

And, as the J.D. Power study results show, by utilizing all forms of communication, you can improve customer loyalty, which means happier customers and more service revenue.

You want that, right?

Survey Question:

Do you use texting at your dealership?

1.    Yes

2.    No

In this video blog, Ujj Nath explores the text messaging solution for dealerships and asks whether a texting solution is adequate by itself.

Not too long ago your service department could rely on seeing customers fairly frequently, but as vehicles have increased in quality, so have the OEM’s suggested service intervals – some are now as much as 15,000 miles between oil changes.

To put this into perspective, in the past, if a customer drove 15,000 miles annually they would visit the dealership on average five times per year. The dealership had five opportunities to recommend additional services and build relationships with the customer. You no longer can count on having as many opportunities to wow customers or pick up additional service business.

So, what do many dealers do? Increase messaging and inundate customers with phone calls, emails, texts and direct mail.

There seems to be a futile focus on trying to bring the customer back after he or she has left the dealership. What this means is that the dealer feels obligated to bombard the consumer with messages via email, direct mail, and phone calls...all of which seem to guarantee just one thing ...that the customer is going to ignore you!

With diminished opportunities, consider reviewing your messaging and be more careful and strategic about the messages you send. While getting the initial visit may have been easy, keeping the customer is becoming more and more difficult as they become used to increased vehicle reliability along with greater competition from other independent service centers in the marketplace, enticing them away with offers of lower prices and greater convenience.

While increased vehicle reliability may decrease opportunities, the wise dealer can capitalize on this by being ready to service their customers when they demand it. And, if you provide ways for the customer to interact with your dealership by their preferred method – be it text, phone, chat or email -- you can still achieve loyalty and increased customer retention.

Customers must know that your dealership is available to them when they need it and will assist them with their vehicle needs at their convenience – not the dealership’s. Keep that in mind the next time you feel like telling a customer you can’t service their car when they want it serviced.