The future of car sales is driven by a whole new customer journey

The typical customer journey has radically changed when it comes to buying a car. Over eighty percent of new car customers (and all used car buyers) begin the process online. And almost all these people visit manufacturers’ websites at some point. Some studies predict that 4% of all cars may be sold via online-only car sales by 2020 (which means around 4 million vehicles).

But even when the purchase is eventually closed offline, the pre-sales process that is leading the way to dealership is just as important. Whether it started online or not, customers do want to talk to an expert and take the car for a test drive - after the first spark of interest is successfully ignited. If dealers and brands don’t try to interact with these shoppers in digital channels, they lose their authority as the primary source of information and their ability to influence and attract the customer.

From a psychological point of view, buying a car has both an emotional and a physical part. The emotional part involves engaging with the brand and the people that represent it - i.e. the dealers or telemarketing professionals themselves. The physical side includes ‘feeling’, touching or even trying the car. Both dimensions can be leveraged and enhanced by innovative customer experiences - for example with augmented reality, video and/or a virtual showroom solution (as we will explain later).

The problem is that most manufacturers fail to provide even the most basic necessities, for example easy access to dealers or call centers. How would they expect to drive leads to their physical locations then? With all those well-informed, digital-savvy customers out there, they are playing Russian roulette if they don’t establish customer interactions across channels. The approach should also shift from ‘selling’ to ‘helping to buy’. It is not about sheer numbers, it is about what the specific customer needs - no matter when, where and how.

No wonder that half the dealers expect the sales process (customer interaction, marketing, lead management) to be affected the most by the automotive digitization trend. The vision of omnichannel in automotive entails that whilst new cars nowadays are primarily sold via physical dealerships, a holistic bricks and clicks ecosystem will tie digital into the process in a natural way.

To back this up, manufacturers and dealers need to unify their data sources to be able to understand and serve their customers. Integrating this expertise into different touch points, they can increase conversion rates and provide a personalized, seamless omnichannel experience. This is critical in the phase of discovery and decision making, aligned with contemporary customers’ need for getting all information upfront, in a convenient way.

In traditional automotive retail, the showroom (i.e. the physical location itself) has been the core of the shopping experience. Still, the concept of the car showroom has stayed pretty much the same over the past fifty years or so - in most cases, sweating sales too much.

This might have been sufficient back in the day when the thread of the customer journey was linear and predictable. But not in the omnichannel, multi-platform era. Nevertheless, the physical experience a showroom allows is still how most people fall in love with cars (just think about the two sides of customer psychology mentioned before).

The key to success is to transform today’s dealerships into an omnichannel sales channel, combining the advantages of the digital world with the strengths of the physical experience. In a nutshell, moving towards a dry, hard-sales oriented experience to a stimulating, customer-centric one.

As discussed earlier, showrooms have a great potential as seeing and feeling the cars is an essential part of the customer journey. But they are also quite expensive to maintain and often stay deserted during low-traffic business hours - and not just due to the fact that they are often in the middle of nowhere.

The virtual car showroom is an exciting new innovation as it helps companies better monetize their dealerships and the web visits alike. By allowing sales representatives to showcase the actual car models to online customers via real-time video, they can trigger interest in booking a follow-up visit or test drive, attracting valuable leads to the dealers.