Keyloop’s Jacqui Barker shares her thoughts on the opportunities for dealers to innovate and to become closer with their customers through divergent technology.

Leaning confidently into technology

In last month’s column, I discussed the challenges of digital transformation and how to take steps toward a more connected ecosystem and make life easier. I briefly mentioned the topic of tech speak—you don’t necessarily need to be an IT guru or know how to code in order to innovate; you just need to understand where to start. 

Of course, Rome wasn’t built in a day. These things take time. I’ve gone from analogue to digital in my own career journey with lots of micro steps of learning over the past 30 years. In today’s column, I’ll explore how automotive businesses could be harnessing data to make more informed decisions, in turn gradually delivering a smoother, more digital car-buying journey for your customers.

Knowing where to start is the essential challenge. The use of legacy systems presents one of the biggest challenges for automotive businesses today. With so much automotive tech on the market, transformation should be easy, but we seem to have added so much complexity to an already cluttered process.

How can we learn from the big tech world and harness the ability to be more agile in the way we work in our businesses every day, not just for customers but for our teams?

Embrace powerful personalisation

Effective, agile development means continual improvement, testing processes and learning through doing, rather than trying to build a whole new process all in one go. Tech providers continually monitor what works across platforms with a view to improving engagement or dwell time on their sites. We see this in action every day with personalisation of the experience with sites like Amazon or Netflix, which deliver content based on your browsing behaviour, and subsequent algorithms. Social media platforms are engineered in the same way using confirmation bias-based algorithms, based on your likes, shares, or what you spend most time reading.

If we take these examples to turn the spotlight onto automotive, there are some areas that we should be learning from and embracing as an industry. As competition intensifies among car dealerships vying for private buyers, new research from digital bank Zopa reveals that personalised experiences (18%) will be crucial to remain competitive in 2025. It’s fair to say we have made huge strides already in some areas with large marketplace sites such as AutoTrader, Motorway and Carwow. These organisations continue to gradually increase intuitive functionality to ensure consumers have everything they need for their car-buying journey within that one-stop-shop site.

OEMs lenders and retailers can adopt a similar approach. First, by building a clear vision of the desired customer experience, then working through each step to audit and identify any glitches in the digital journey.

There is no such thing as a traditional walk in customer anymore. Today’s consumers most likely will arrive fully clued up and ready to buy. Even when a consumer steps over the threshold, they’re still empowered to source the right deal at the right time, with research from HRC Retail Advisory 59% of shoppers use their mobile devices in-store to compare costs or research deals and coupons. As an industry we often push consumers to repeat everything they have already done at this stage, making it a lengthy and frustrating process. Forward-thinking businesses must start thinking about these key stages where the customer might get stuck or simply check out of the process. These pain points can easily be rectified. Simply by using the right technology, particularly solutions that give you the data you need, you could drive that efficiency, eliminate re-keying, and deliver powerful personalisation for your customers.

Work in collaboration with your tech partners

So how can we do that well and consistently to make the whole automotive experience for a customer feel connected and seamless?

Working with trusted tech partners can support your step-by-step transformation to ensure that customer journeys connect and flow, with the consumer experience at the heart of your vision. Explore how a forward-thinking technology partner can become an extension of the team to drive the transformation you need.

Technology connects a huge ecosystem that is unique to every OEM in every market, while the retail sector adds an entirely new layer of complexity, so the first question is whether your existing tech stack unlocks the most efficiency in your business. The main purpose should be to drive conversion and reduce the cost of lead acquisition.

Understanding your user experience

For retailers looking to accelerate their digital transformation, it’s important to start with a discovery phase with a customer hat on. The Bank of America, for example, increased their registration rate by up to 24% after redesigning the user experience to drive registration (Medium, 2023). This kind of tech discovery process enables you to map out every stage of the customer journey from the view of a customer, we call this UX research.

Find some willing volunteers and track how they go through the process at every stage and identify the key pain points. This process takes time, but it is an essential part of understanding where customers get stuck or frustrated.

Converting to convergence

Convergence should be a key priority for businesses looking to drive a connected experience. Retailers who bring together processes across the entire ecosystem will truly reap the rewards in the coming months and years. By streamlining and connecting every process and bringing together traditionally siloed departments and functions businesses could be unlocking huge efficiency gains and ultimately drive margins simply through efficiency alone.

Converting to convergent technology means you reframe the entire narrative of your customer longevity. Where before, so much energy went into the sale of a customer’s new vehicle, and customers were largely neglected until they seemed like they’re in the next new car buying window, convergent automotive technology now changes the game. Bringing together the entire ecosystem means that retailers can now think of customers as life-long advocates. 

Next month I’ll shine more of a light on the power of convergence in driving greater efficiency for your business.