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By: Earl Brown, Autofusion (2024)
How do car shoppers perceive your dealership’s current sales process and customer journey?
Is it intuitive? Accurate? Efficient? Does it connect your shoppers with your professional staff to solve their problems and find the best way forward quickly, or does it essentially just assume that they will “sell themselves” if you serve them enough CTA’s and push them to a contact form? According to the 2022 and 2023 Cox Automotive Car Buyer Journey Study, a good customer experience and trust in the dealer/salesperson was a major factor for today’s car shoppers.
Between 2020 and 2022, the rate of consumers describing their most recent car buying experience as “worse” grew by a staggering 267% from 6% to 16% of total shoppers.
There is plenty of consumer research that proves shoppers believe the automotive shopping process to be unnecessarily confusing, opaque, and time-consuming, and this sentiment seems to be especially prevalent among the Millenial and Gen Z shoppers. According to another study from KPA, 76% of car buyers distrust dealers to be honest about things as fundamental to the shopping process as pricing. In many of these studies, consumers have said their views were driven by their own past experiences, anecdotes from friends and family, and the perception that dealers design the retail process (at least to some extent) to bewilder shoppers.
The truth is that car shoppers are busy living their lives, and are not automotive experts like dealers are, so they tend to be skeptical of things they don’t fully comprehend.
It’s human nature. However, it doesn’t necessarily mean dealers should focus all of their efforts on pushing shoppers to a sterilized digital retail page in hopes they swipe a credit card and sell themselves a vehicle, especially not in a buyer’s market, where every opportunity matters.
Technology plays a key role in attaining process efficiency, but at the end of the day, shoppers still need to connect with real experts to help assess individual needs and navigate the process most effectively. Fortunately, there are many ways software can enhance the modern sales process without displacing that core consultative functionality that dealers have always provided. After-all, that is the entire value-proposition of the dealership business model.
Some of the more obvious issues consumers have said they have with today’s automotive retail process include things like:
A dealer’s control over certain aspects of the sales process is obviously limited. After all, buying a vehicle is not always going to be as simple as tossing a new set of $99 headphones into your Amazon shopping cart and clicking “ship now”. It is still a very consequential decision for most people, with a lot of options, minutia, and shopper-specific variables that make it difficult to design a singular process that works perfectly for everybody.
Despite what some software providers intimate, a majority of shoppers still prefer to complete the purchase in-store with a real professional, which reminds me of the common sales-manager maxim: “the feel of the wheel seals the deal”. Putting your shoppers right in front of your trained professionals (and the product itself) as early and as often as possible, is a fantastic way to save shoppers time and reduce frustration that comes with navigating a complicated process by themselves. In-a-nutshell, building a more personalized and interactive road to the sale, will lead to a happier and more profitable customer-base for your dealership.
Next week, we will begin publishing follow ups to this article, in which we will look at specific ideas and technologies that can help dealers craft a more efficient, proactive, and trustworthy online experience for their virtual shoppers.
