Retail Automotive Industry: Atomic Age meets the Information Age

The retail automotive industry is an interesting and slowly evolving business, that fights change every step of the way. Few dealerships today understand how much the market has changed and how much it is going to change in the next few short years. Still clinging to old business practices, shady and misleading advertising, and an antiquated pricing system the rest of the civilized world has abandoned they continue to struggle with client retention and customer service index (CSI) scores.

The general environment of the retail automotive industry has been carefully created over the last fifty years here in the United States (U.S.). Customers have been slowly conditioned in this market to create an entitled consumer that is difficult to please, and more demanding over the years. Couple this to the confusion and too much choice your average consumer is overwhelmed by the endless options and combinations of vehicles, and payment options. In the U.S. today, consumers now must choose between 48 manufactures, each with multiple vehicles, and each vehicle with multiple trim levels and options. As more people have access to internet research, invoice price, costs, and incentives are in the hands of consumers, making it more difficult for dealerships to retain a viable profit margin on new vehicles. However, many dealers, professional training groups, managers and owners, attempt to address the customer in the same way they did before.

The retail automotive industry as a whole is going to be forced to follow the CarMax formula for doing business. As consumers have more control over the buying process with information and misinformation, it makes it harder to direct the sale. The demographics of consumers are different for every dealer as Ford of Beverly Hills has a different clientele then Sunland Ford in the high desert. However, the one key that stays the same is that fact that eight out of ten have been online doing some form of research.

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Don’t get caught up in the buzz words such as “CRM”, “DMS”, “Solutions”, “Systems”, “Portal”, “Lead Generation”, “TMS”, etc and etc. Instead you should focus on words such as “intuitive”, “effective”, “affordable”, and phrases such as “well designed”, and above all “user friendly”. Many of the sales representatives of these so called “automotive CRM solution vendors” don’t have the first clue what exactly is a CRM system. Neither is the sales manager wearing a shirt and tie who is impressed by all these tech savvy acronyms. By definition a CRM solution, especially in the automotive industry is difficult to develop in nature. This is due to several reasons; For one, no two dealerships will operate in the exact same way, their business process, sales process are not standardized to develop a universal business model in which their CRM solution suppose to follow. This grey area can be difficult to overcome, leaving certain CRM solutions only successful with certain dealerships. Almost all of the CRM solutions today fail to realize the first rule of software development that “humans are more intelligent than computers”. Yes that’s right, even car sales man is smarter than your standard Intel Celeron chip set.

When are you presented with the CRM demo, look for things such as user interface design, does things make sense to you? Is the placement of the text input fields logically arranged? Is there a process that is unnecessary? Or worse are there any super imposed rules in the CRM you can’t break? And above all how much is all this really costing you? Well one red flag of poorly developed user interface is the time this CRM solution takes for you to input a brand new customer. Remember how many clicks before you can start typing the customer’s information into the corresponding fields. You should stay away from per user charged accounts all together, because this payment method will bleed you dry of all revenue, unless you are on top of your game and monitor the system accuracy, and your invoices. Most of the sales manager today will not have that luxury of time to perform such task. After all why should you add an addition job description for something that is supposed to reduce your work load?

Look for small things such as does the vendor give you the flexibility to have minimum contracts as little as one year. Or are you locked in for life by this CRM solution, that maybe just a bomb just waiting to go off one day. Does the system require specific class room setting training sessions? Or is it intuitive enough for you to figure it out on the first try? Does the system offer you the manager, the capability to edit, add, and delete account? Or do you have to call a 1-800 number and wait for 25 minutes on the phone? Once again thank you for reading this article, it is brought to you by Dealer Elite CRM, a Canadian based automotive CRM and DMS solution provider. Visit us online for your video walk through at http://www.dealertemplate.ca or http://www.dealerelites.ca

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Automotive Manufacturing – Global Group of Eight (G8) Industry Guide is an essential resource for top-level data and analysis covering the Automotive Manufacturing industry in each of the G8 (United States, Canada, Germany, France, United Kingdom, Italy, Russia and Japan) countries. The report includes easily comparable data on market value, volume, segmentation and market share, plus full five year market forecasts. It examines future problems, innovations and potential growth areas within the market.

Scope of the Report

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