Data is the new gold, and with significant changes coming up and numerous industry players looking to get their hands on it, dealers will need to ensure they are an integral part of the process.
For years dealers have allowed just about any vendor, who appeared to have a good idea and a promise to increase revenues, to gain access to some (if not all) of their data.
Be it lead generation, email marketing programs, inventory, service work order, website providers, OEMs, performance group and/or composite providers — whatever it was, dealers have cooperated by sharing their transactional, performance, customer, and vehicle data pools with the hopes of a brighter future.
Data sharing arrangements have surfaced with just about all OEMs. Even DMS providers have required vendors to be certified, adding yet another layer of complexity to an already confusing situation.
Historically, and at the heart of all this, has been dealer dependence on the pool of DMS systems, combined with various bolt-on products, seen as adding desired additional value to the data captured within their DMS. Some of the bolt-on products are able to access the DMS directly, while others operate more like standalone independent systems requiring cumbersome data input either manually or through data screen scrapes for other dealer systems.
Vendors have promised greater access to customer wallets as the magic formula to increase revenues. Numerous vendors regularly visit dealerships right across Canada to attempt to sell them “much needed” software to share their proprietary competitive prowess — all for one low monthly easy payment, forever.
Many NADA exhibitors this year are coming clean and have identified data as the new gold currency. Technology vendors are nothing new at NADA, but their focus on your data value, previously in the background, is now front and centre in their new product offerings.
“Data is the new gold” seems to be the mantra of the day. With the advancement of 5G, the connected vehicle, connected cities, the Internet of Things (IoT), and autonomous this and that, data has developed into the new battleground for dealerships.
Numerous vendors regularly visit dealerships right across Canada to attempt to sell them “much needed” software to share their proprietary competitive prowess — all for one low monthly easy payment, forever.
Customers, their behaviour and their assets’ behaviour, now either do or are about to produce an unprecedented volume of data. Of course collecting that data, aggregating it and making timely, meaningful and useful information out of it, is the ultimate goal.
Voice data is a recent entry, as this technology has been greatly expanded and is now more reliable and affordable. With Alexa, Siri and others engaged on the vehicle voice instruction, data is becoming a real potential gold mine. Eventually consumer privacy and protection regulations will limit this sort of thing, once the regulators catch up to the ever developing technologies and their potential impact on humans. But technologists are designing features that make communication and access easy for customers.
Robots were all over the Consumer Electronics Show in January in Las Vegas. Exhibiting human-like behaviour, voice activation, and responses are critical to their performance. Remembering its electronics, data capture, storage and manipulation, these human-like machines are manufactured to exhibit human-like intelligence coming from machine learning. It’s a simulation of human intelligence found in computer systems built by humans. And it requires enormous amounts of data and billions of lines of programming.
So how does this affect automobile dealerships? Our world is changing and communication is at the forefront. Dealers must understand their role in responsible data management and the potential pitfalls that could surface, seemingly out of nowhere, that could have a negative impact on your business.
Data security is paramount in the future world of risk management. It’s been described as the most important public policy issue of our time. As dealers, we must make it our number one priority to control the collection, storage, access, and usage of all the data passing through our dealerships’ IT systems.
With all the remote access to our systems, through the internet connectivity that we have all authorized, cyber security risk management is a new skill that dealerships must excel in. It’s always been an issue, but in the rapidly changing world of information technology, protection of our IT systems from damage, theft, and unauthorized access in an environment of rapidly expanding data sources online and cloud interactions, presents an incredible business risk. Your risk of being hacked and the resulting reputational damage can cause the unthinkable. And let’s not forget the legal risk either.
Our dealerships do not operate in a controlled, sustainable environment. As dealers we are dependent upon our OEM and IT vendors’ policies and practices. A goof-up at any one of your vendors could negatively impact your customers. A goof-up at any one of your vendor’s vendors could create a customer disruption right up the chain, which would negatively affect your dealership reputation.
Sure, you have contracts that hopefully protect your interests. But when there is an immediate problem, enforcing contractual rights will not be timely enough to mitigate customer impact. The damage will have been done.
Employee training and rigid processes have never been more important. Your employees must be highly skilled in all aspects of data collection.
Employee training and rigid processes have never been more important. Your employees must be highly skilled in all aspects of data collection. It’s far too easy to enter incorrect data or skip certain data fields altogether in the interest of saving time. There could be a significant cost to not following your processes — one of which is the richness of your information. Blank or incorrect field entries could be critical to such measures as retention or customer follow-up, just to name a few.
Data is vast and enormous. It’s comprised of millions of unique data elements. For instance, each keystroke made on one of your computers or from a tablet’s touch screen is a data point captured within your IT system, web browser, cloud back-up, etc. In this article alone there are over 5,000 individual data points. You get the picture.
The next phase of the data avalanche will be from the vehicles and drivers themselves. Yes, this is true today. But with few exceptions, your customers’ vehicles need to be plugged into your diagnostic machines to gain access and sharing opportunities.
In the very near future, most (if not all) vehicles will be sending performance data wirelessly. Vehicle component performance, driver behaviour, driver in-vehicle messaging, accidents, etc., will all be transmitted seamlessly through the airways. This will represent an enormous amount of data.
This data will be of interest to many different parties such as Tier 1 component suppliers, OEMs, insurance companies, cities, tire manufacturers, the aftermarket, restaurants, coffee shops, and more.
This is all “gold-in-the-making” for someone and dealerships should be an integral part of the process, as data is about to kick into high gear.
