One challenge for automotive dealerships is how to engage with customers more profitably.  Dealers collect a great deal of data about customers, but this is often held in disparate databases and can be too unwieldy to use effectively.  Data consolidation and analysis provides a solution by providing increased visibility and greater accuracy of customer information.  By understanding the data in more detail, a dealership can carry out sales and marketing activity far more profitably.

1. Predictive marketing

Predictive marketing data gives dealers a clear view of which customers to contact at a given time, along with what the marketing message should be.  Workshop records, vehicle data and customer details can all indicate which customers are due for a service or MOT.  This helps to retain customers and entice back lapsed customers with attentive service.

2. Customer satisfaction monitoring

Customer data can be extracted from workshop systems and vehicle sales invoices held in the Dealer Management System (DMS).   Once the data is cleansed, checked and categorised, the relevant customers can be asked to take part in satisfaction surveys.  Data categorisation means that surveys can be segmented according to whether the respondent is a private or corporate customer, a new or used car purchaser or by type of job (MOT vs repairs vs servicing).   The results can be used to create a Customer Satisfaction Index, enabling a dealership to monitor performance and set KPIs for every department.

3. Efficiency improvements

Consolidated dealership data can be used to monitor stock levels, ensuring that the servicing departments have the right stock in place to meet future demand, without tying up cash in over-stocking.  Our systems can predict sales and automatically recommend which parts should be reordered.

So how can these benefits be achieved?  Our automotive consultants use DataHub, our managed service, to collate all of a dealership’s data.  Key to the service is data consolidation, a process during which we extract data in different formats from multiple systems.  Our software also checks data quality, identifying data that is missing or incorrect because it was not recorded correctly at the time of the customer visit.

DataHub automatically collects data from the DMS each day and stores it in our secure data warehouse.  The data is then used to create regular reports which are tailored to a dealership’s individual requirements.

Further reading

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