How can automotive brands capitalise on their new responsibilities in the agency model to revolutionise customer experience?

The traditional car buying process is fragmented – dealers gatekeep DMS data, finance gatekeeps finance data, etc. – and feels harder than it should be. Much harder than buying other items, anyway.

This is largely down to the number of stakeholders in the sales chain, operating in siloes with different technologies and competing priorities. But by owning the customer relationship, the brand can now command a lead role. Every other player is still important, but each must deliver a clearly defined role with indetectable boundaries, delivering a seamless, single brand experience.

What do customers want?

Considering 59% of the car purchasing journey is spent online researching, whether buying in-dealer or online a customer’s journey will be heavily dependent on digital resources. Today’s customers are used to an “Apple ID” across all Apple products and the ease of Amazon online purchases and customer experience. These everyday experiences have set the baseline of what is now expected when making any purchase. A customer only sees the single brand they are interacting with, not Dealer vs. OEM vs. Finance. For OEMs to deliver an experience to meet rising customer expectations requires a paradigm shift to traditional customer experience strategy.

Where do we need to get to?

1. One voice
   Stakeholders must collaborate, share data, and enable one brand voice to the customer. This will deliver consistency, clarity, and confidence across multiple channels providing choice.
   
2. Collaboration
   Transparency of customer correspondence and actions can be seen by all participants via a single platform. The customer never has to repeat old ground, explain, or evidence what happened previously.
   
3. Transparency
   Customers know what’s happening, what comes next, and can self-serve or easily get in touch to find out more. Documents can be compliantly and easily accessed with minimal effort.

So, how can brands capitalise on their new responsibilities and revolutionalise the customer experience? 

A great start is to focus on doing the basics well. Sounds simple, but cutting through legacy complexity is a tough, and critical, step.

Contact centre transformation.

The contact centre has long been a critical human touch point. As OEMs enhance their direct-to-customers infrastructure, this becomes ever more important, expanding the use-cases for interaction including reinforcing automated CRM, facilitating sales and of course, triage where necessary.

To deliver these new capabilities brands must transform their previously reactive contact centre into a proactive engagement centre, enabled via technology, upskill, and change management. An engagement centre delivers predictive and proactive engagement, personalised service, and next best action, as well as offers driven by a unified platform with AI support. The transparency and seamless understanding of a customer’s history, correspondence, and predictive action will drive value throughout the sales and ownership experience.

Enabling retail operations.

Data and technology strategy is required to underpin the commercial capabilities, driving efficiency through automation and delivering a data-driven, personalised experience. Optimised data and delivery architecture – driving an end-to-end CRM system that encompasses engagement centre, retailer, finance, and OEM – provides integrated comms, action transparency, connected experience, and activates the transition to ownership.

The key foundation to enabling transformative retail operations is a clearly defined and cohesive data strategy, driving a single view of the customer. The data output executed with a single end-to-end system architecture will deliver the most cohesive result. The outcome will be increased conversion, greater KPI tracking & forecasting, and improved customer experience.

Many OEMs today have cloud technology for their data. However, with disparate data bricks not cohesively aligned this, partnered with legacy systems architecture, will not provide the foundations for a renewed customer experience aligned with the agency model. Causing gaps and duplication, and customer confusion. Whichever party in the agency process, whether finance, contact centre or manufacturer were to investigate the customer record, they should all have the same information, a single view of customer behaviours and activities with a clear roadmap of future activities, including automated or non-automated follow ups.

Personalised communications.

Driven by enriched data inputs and optimised system architecture, the agency model is enabled to deliver automated, tailored, personalised comms and offers for maximum impact and conversion. Several other frameworks should be in place to allow initial action and ongoing improvement. For example, data sharing / legal frameworks and processes, KPIs to drive continuous improvement, and incorporating customer feedback. The experience and data ownership gives OEMs greater power to build understanding of each individual customer, driving a hyper personalised experience and communications framework to maximise lifetime value of the customer across sales and ownership.

Automation of end-to-end service comms will remove the onus on the dealer and finance departments, allowing a more impactful role of the contact centre to then follow up on these automated comms. Automation will also support in no customers “falling through the gaps” via the conventional retail process.

The OEM will need to play a greater role in setting the roadmap of the automated journey and key touch points. Though this will have significantly more complexity when compared to today’s model as it will need to cater for a hyper personalised journey. Different triggers may send a customer down a different comms path with different copy and calls to action, again driving a different path toward the customer’s desired destination. The role of AI may play a key role in this space as it supports in tailoring the experience based on several simultaneous data inputs.

In summary….

• Critical to the success of contact centre transformation, enabling retail operations and personalised communications is integrated business transformation. Business process and technology must be shaped harmoniously, and the change impact acknowledged and managed effectively.

• Contact centre transformation, enabling retail operations, and personalised communications are all required to deliver a seamless agency experience. If one is missing in the transformation gaps will become apparent compromising the business transformation.

• An optimised master data and cloud strategy driving a unified CRM and sales platform will deliver automated and personalised experiences. As well as communications facilitated by the dealer and engagement centre.

• All transformed business areas will cultivate the foundations to drive a renewed omnichannel experience for sales and support, maximising lifetime value of the customer in ownership. Delivering impactful experience and revenue gains.

As a result, all players in in the ecosystem will have a clearly defined role with indetectable boundaries, delivering a personalised experience that is consistent and clear to the customer, and seamless with the brand. Which means significant improvements to customer experience, clearly visible in increased conversion, NPS and repurchase, driving incremental revenue and profits throughout the lifetime of the customer.

How can Capgemini help?

Capgemini has deep expertise in the automotive industry, helping the world’s leading automotive brands and their suppliers lead the way in shaping a new mobility landscape. We enable new business models like D2C and mobility-as-a-service to satisfy evolving customer expectations and empower our clients to diversify, grow their businesses, and get closer to their customers.

Visit our dedicated automotive page or reach out to Capgemini’s experienced D2C team to find out how we can answer your business challenge and support you through the automotive industry’s great transformation.

If you missed them, catch up on the first two instalments of our ‘Agency Sales and Beyond’ series, here and here.