DISRUPTERS AT THE GATE
Studies show customers in the retail automotive sphere want better service, and more online options
“I’ll just Uber it.”
Eighteen months ago, this is not a sentence that would have made much sense in Canada’s largest cities, let alone being a part of the common lexicon.
What’s more, it posed no existential threat to the ride-for-hire establishment.
Fast-forward a year-and-a-half, and the urban mobility landscape has been forever transformed for many users. Such is life in a rapidly evolving marketplace.
While predicated on a nifty and intuitive app, the Uber success story actually follows a very old business script: the identification of systemic — not necessarily technological — pain points and then the implementation of solutions to those operational and experiential challenges with specific and effective tactics.
In short, Uber wins because the customer experience is superior.
A similar tension is building in the retail automotive sphere as customers become increasingly frustrated by what they (somewhat rightly) perceive as an industry out of step with their ever-evolving expectations.
The J.D. Power Canadian sales satisfaction index and manufacturer website evaluation studies have both found that a majority of vehicle buyers (particularly those in Gen Y) are willing to conduct much of their purchase experience online, from negotiation to finance and down-payment considerations.
While this is really just a natural extension of the broader shift to online research and purchase behaviour, vehicle shoppers today express frustration at what they see as a lack of basic retail tools such as side-by-side competitive comparisons and the ability to locate a specific product in inventory — functionality they find in almost all of their other online transactional experiences.
And these complaints with a sub-optimal online experience say nothing of an in-store purchase experience that misses opportunities, by design, to engage customers with tech-driven solutions to make the process more efficient, transparent, and, ultimately, more customer-centric.
Today, more than twice as many customers want to book their service occasions online as those who are able to do so.
Only one in five service advisers has the benefit of employing efficiency and transparency-breeding tablet technology during the writeup — even when satisfaction spikes dramatically when this is the case — and, inexplicably, only about half of all service customers indicate having access to fast and complimentary Wi-Fi in service waiting areas, despite this being a price-of-entry expectation in every coffee shop across the country, where average transaction values are a fraction the size.
To be clear, agitating for these modest technological enhancements is not a step designed to simply appease a crowd of millennial car buyers, nor is it a solution that will inoculate the current sales and service business models from any future disruption.
They can be, however, a series of tactics designed to meet the cus- tomer where they, frankly, expect the industry to be — and to ultimately improve the experience of buying and owning a vehicle.
It’s appropriating the very same Business 101 tactics Uber deployed with great success: identifying gaps in the customer experience and then enhancing that experience with effective technology-driven solutions.
As market disrupters continue their push to commoditize personal mobility — arguably the industry’s most significant longterm challenge — manufacturers and retailers that leverage the right technologies to create truly customer-centric ecosystems will likely continue to thrive.
However, those that elect to believe in the permanence of the status quo will undoubtedly join the swelling ranks of disgruntled reactionaries, picking fights they don’t realize they’ve already lost.