Big changes are happening in our industry. New technologies are injecting incredible insight and efficiency into our everyday workflow. Customers are demanding faster transactions; less than half of consumers are satisfied with the length of the car buying process, according to the Cox Automotive Future of Digital Retailing Study. And dealerships are consolidating like never before; the top five dealer groups in the U.S. are made up of a combined 979 dealerships, according to the 2017 WardsAuto Megadealer 100.
All these changes should be radically transforming the way dealers do business, yet many dealerships are still functioning like they did in the old days. Many dealers still operate with a siloed view of their customers: Sales doesn’t know about service customers, or Store A has no way of knowing that their customer has also been talking with Store B down the street.
Today’s most successful dealers have transformed operations across their business see each customer as what they really are: one person.
There three major reasons for shifting your operations to be focused on a single view of the customer: data hygiene, streamlined workflow and customer connection quality.
Clean Data
If you’re still operating based on a siloed view of your customers, you almost certainly have errors in your database. For example, in separated databases, an email address update doesn’t translate from service to sales. Dirty data can cause a lot of problems for dealerships. Bad data costs U.S. businesses more than $3 trillion annually, and an estimated 30% of sales and marketing data is unusable.
On top of the operational efficiencies this causes, dirty data directly impacts your customers’ experience with your dealership. Nearly half of people are annoyed by a business getting their personal information wrong, and more than a third say they have less faith in the business to do a good job when they make a data quality error.
A solution like Enterprise Customer for Connect CRM can automate data reconciliation across your business to give you a single view of your customers, so ask what your options are.
Streamlined Workflow
This one is straightforward, but still worth mentioning. Having a single view of a full customer profile from all rooftops saves you time.
Many dealer groups recognize that they should be managing their customer’s interactions and transactions across all their stores, but trying to manually collect all that information from different instances of multiple software platforms is time-consuming and inefficient.
We at VinSolutions heard the needs of dealership groups, and the new Enterprise Customer solution provides the time-saving single view dealers need to streamline workflow.
Connections that Count
An accurate database and streamlined workflow facilitate the biggest benefit to having a single view of your customers: higher quality connections.
90 percent of consumers prefer a unique, personalized car-buying journey, according to the Cox Automotive Future of Digital Retail Study. Working from a single, comprehensive view of each customer allows you to provide that experience.
Understanding where your customer has been throughout the entirety of their car-buying journey – not just within your walls – exposes insights that allow you to better understand and anticipate customer needs. And understanding customer needs leads to more sales.
A version of this post originally appeared in Dealer Marketing Magazine.
Enabling Enterprise Customer delivers insights you need to drive more sales and profitability.
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