Current data indicates that the Australian automotive market is on track to surpass last year's record-breaking new car sales figures once again this year. While demand for cars is outstripping supply in some areas, retail dealerships are facing a new challenge, Australians are increasingly buying cars online.
This reflects global trends where, according to this McKinsey report, less than a third of younger clients buy cars in person.
To adapt to shifting customer expectations, dealerships are using automotive business intelligence and analytics to digitise their offerings and optimise workflows. Business intelligence tools give dealers insight into past performance while also helping them predict current and future business.
There’s a lot to unpack here. Let’s start by exploring what it means to digitise your dealership.
Digital dealerships offer secure websites where customers can go through the entire sales process online. This includes virtual product walkarounds, consulting with sales representatives and signing contracts.
While going digital helps you capture customers who want to buy online, your online storefront is a way of attracting ‘window shoppers’ who are researching which vehicle to buy. As they explore your offerings, you have the opportunity to convert them into hot leads. You can do this by providing free online consultations or getting their email addresses when they download your resources.
Another benefit comes from integrating your website with Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software. As sophisticated CRM can track all your interactions with customers, you can personalise their digital experience by adding menu add-ons or recommending aftermarket products depending on their previous queries.
All this can result in a frictionless sales process that gently pulls customers through each buying step, potentially leading to more sales for less effort. But to unlock these benefits, you need to update your processes to handle the needs of both your physical and digital deal pipelines.
Building your digital pipeline is an opportunity to boost what your dealership is capable of while also improving customer experience.
That piece about customer experience is vital, especially as 32% of customers stop dealing with a brand after only one bad experience — that’s according to this PWC study. For your customers, a bad experience might include having to answer the same questions multiple times as they speak with different dealership departments — either online or in the showroom.
Imagine the following example: a customer spends weeks researching the car they want, using your website in the process. This customer then moves to the final buying stage, but it’s only then that they discover the car is unavailable.
This misalignment is a common problem for traditional dealerships, where obscured pipelines may lead to one team altering a deal without informing your other departments. When refurbishing cars, for example, this can lead to a selling price being set without your salespeople knowing that an extra fix is needed. The result is that your price doesn’t reflect your costs.
These scenarios can be avoided by using automotive business intelligence tools and data to align your teams, arm them with information, and create a streamlined digital pipeline that eliminates customer frustrations. That means using business intelligence to track your deals and inventory accurately and develop real-time reports that can be shared with your departments.
Business intelligence is crucial in digitising your offerings and building efficient deal pipelines by giving you a clear view of your dealership functions. Here are some ways that dealerships benefit customer experience and deal management:
The benefit of business intelligence is that the more data you get, the more accurate your dealership reporting and analytics will become. That means that over time, you can use this reporting to consistently increase dealership performance. By monitoring customer engagement, you’ll be able to make changes according to shifts in consumer behaviour.
To adapt to the changing Australian market, dealerships need to expand their digital presence, offer top customer experiences and streamline their deal pipelines. Implementing business intelligence is the first step toward achieving these goals.
At SalesLogs, we offer a business intelligence tool that has helped dealerships unlock better pipeline management and meet the expectations of customers.
Our business intelligence solution includes:
Book a free demo to see how we can boost dealership performance.