You can avoid embracing the digital age. But I wouldn’t recommend it.
As I prepared to write this column, my first for 2018, I read through my 2017 submissions, looking for some inspiration and reflecting back on some of the subjects we discussed.
After reading through them, I recognized that I had predominantly focused on two things — your organization’s business and the Customer Experience, and how the two really go hand in hand; that when you structure your business in a way that you can deliver an optimal customer experience, you end up with a win-win.
And if you remember Habit #4 from Stephen R. Covey’s book 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, you know how important Win-Win scenarios are — in both business and in life.
While I will touch on other trends that I believe will impact our industry over the next 12 months, or at least start to make headway, I still think there is so much to discuss around customer experience and how it remains critical to your business’s success. After all, it’s the customer who makes the ultimate decision; they are in the driver’s seat.
A lot of our discussions in our SCI boardrooms and hallways revolve around where the automotive world is going. We debate about what our industry will look like in one year, three years, or even ten years down the road.
We discuss and cautiously predict the ways your customers will want to do business in the future and additionally, who will be the big players in the marketplace? Might we see more disruptors like Google and Amazon enter our industry in a much bigger way?
While we may not always see eye to eye on some things, we all agree that you need to keep focus on the road ahead if you want to compete in the marketplace.
I recently attended an auto industry conference in Detroit, Mich. where we talked data and customer experience. A recent Polk survey presented at the conference showed that consumer loyalty with Dealerships is at 39 per cent.
Boiled down it means that for every 10 customers, you are losing six.
Furthermore, consumer loyalty by manufacturer is no better at 50 per cent and in that scenario, for every 10 customers, you are losing five.
If those statistics are anything, they are concerning. If you imagine any business which loses half of their customers, I think you’d want to ask — “What are you doing to fix that”?
I wonder if companies like Sears, Kodak, Blockbuster or RadioShack ever asked those kinds of questions when they saw their customer base start to dwindle?
In many of those cases, innovation, or lack thereof, was their downfall, and unfortunately they failed to offer the best customer experiences that were being offered by their competitors.
While we may not always see eye to eye on some things, we all agree that you need to keep focus on the road ahead if you want to compete in the marketplace.
One of the challenges that many dealerships face today is how they measure success in the digital age. As I’ve mentioned in previous columns, marketing your business 20 years ago was a much simpler task given that you had far fewer avenues in which to share your message.
Typically you went to the printed newspapers to advertise your deals, or you used radio and/or television if you had more marketing dollars at your disposal.
Fast forward to today and the digital age has changed pretty much everything; now you’re discussing terms like Pay-Per-Click, reputation management, online forms and digital metrics.
For someone who has been around the block a few times (like myself) all this new jargon is daunting, confusing, and a for the most part, a huge annoyance. It’s disrupting the way we go about our day to day business as well as how we measure our success.
Now, I’ll be the first to admit that I was where you are — overwhelmed and intimidated. Not only was I challenged to learn and understand what all this jargon meant, I knew that I really had no choice if I wanted to keep up with the way our world was going.
And what I learned about all of this digital “stuff” is that it is far less daunting, and, on the plus side, is more measurable than any traditional media.
Which means that you can use real metrics to identify what’s working and what isn’t, and then make informed decisions to reallocate marketing dollars or and ramp up efforts in those areas that are working well for you. No more guessing.
And yes, while the old way may have seemed somewhat easier, once you get to understand some of the concepts of digital, it will become far less confusing, leading to the ability to make better decisions for your business. And so the old adage is incorrect — you can teach an old dog new tricks! Or in my case, a Bird.
There has been so much talk about the “connected car” and it continues to monopolize many of our conversations.
I firmly believe that connected cars and the power of data will continue to make headlines in the months and years to come.
According to Business Insider, the connected car market is growing at a five-year compound annual growth rate of 45 per cent — more than 10 times as fast as the overall car market.
Additionally, BI intelligence estimates “that by 2020, 75 per cent of cars shipped globally will be built with the necessary hardware to connect to the Internet.”
The enormous amount of data collected by the vehicle’s computer system regarding driving habits, routes, driver behaviour, etc. will become a hot commodity and your customer’s valuable intel will be what companies will be vying to obtain.
The opportunities for B2C companies to market directly to a driver, using insights gathered from that same driver’s actual behaviour will be infinite and while many may balk at the “Big Brother is watching” idea, it’s already happening today.
Let me give you a hypothetical example. Let’s say your customer is a regular coffee drinker and they take the same route in the morning, stopping off at the same coffee shop drive thru to get their double-double on the way into the office.
Consumers tend to be drawn to companies that are innovative. Who remembers just a few years ago when folks were questioning the merits of Netflix?
Their vehicle, with its ability to recognize routes, identify business locations and thus make connections between the two, will collect this data and provide it to the coffee company.
They, in turn, will target the driver, either with incentives or some other marketing tactic to drive business. This is one example in a sea of potential scenarios, all of which rely on real data.
And while all that might sound very futuristic, think of the risk this poses. Your customer’s data will live in the vehicle’s computer system and once a customer returns a car, what would you, the Dealer or the OEM, be responsible for regarding that data? What process will you put in place to ensure that your customer is protected? And how will you guarantee your customer that their data is protected?
While these conversations may be had once the car is returned, you should really be prepared to start having the discussion during the buying phase to ensure you alleviate any potential concerns your customer may have right out of the gate.
Consumers tend to be drawn to companies that are innovative. Who remembers just a few years ago when folks were questioning the merits of Netflix? Now, if you don’t have Netflix, folks are wondering what’s wrong with you. It doesn’t take long, does it folks?
While my good friend Brent Wees argues that specific marketing to millennials is for suckers, there are approximately 10 million millennials in Canada who gravitate to innovation and specifically to those companies who dare challenge the status quo.
Furthermore, what the millennials did was demand a better experience, one that is rooted in technology, convenience, and a WOW factor. And they did it in such a way that they influenced the expectations of other generations who recognized they wanted this too.
While you will find some consumers who are still all about the “best bang for your buck,” you may start to find that folks will pay a bit more for convenience or for a better experience. Just look at Amazon. They’ve managed to do both really well.
Folks, it’s a fractured process right now and it’s evident that everyone is fighting over their piece of the consumer pie.
This is creating havoc as to who owns the customer experience — is it the dealer, the OEM, or the lender?
We know our industry is slow to adapt to changes and so maybe we count ourselves lucky that we, like other industries haven’t been upended by a more sleek approach to doing business.
However, it’s the lack of sophistication that will eventually allow others to step in and start dominating the market. What it really boils down to is that the one who really drives the experience is the customer. And to survive, that’s who we need to keep up with!
