In the earliest days of ecommerce, Ben Whomersley – now Keyloop’s Regional OEM Director for UK and Ireland – told a colleague, “Digital retail is the future of car sales.” The response? “Don’t be ridiculous!” Decades later, and thoroughly vindicated, Ben shares his 25 years of insight into a changing industry and explains how Keyloop’s cutting–edge dealership management software is leading the charge towards placing customer experience at the heart of the car-buying journey.
The old world: traditional car showrooms
When Ben entered the automotive industry, most customers started their car-buying journey with a copy of the classified ads. Dealership marketing strategies revolved around getting potential buyers through the doors, and deals were closed face-to-face via tried and tested sales processes. Today, the retail world is moving increasingly out of the physical space and into the digital, but many dealerships are still finding it difficult to navigate the transition away from the offline model.
“They want to control the process from start to finish,” says Ben. “But customers no longer want that sales process. They just want to know the price and what options they have. They don’t want to be ‘sold to’ anymore – they want to have all the information to hand, and then they’ll tell you whether or not they want to buy.”
He compares these revised customer expectations to booking a holiday: we begin with a broad search for flights, then zero in on the dates and times that suit. Then, with the logistics in place, we’ll consider the extras. Do we want to take an additional suitcase? What size or weight do we need? Should we rent a car at the airport? Pre-purchase a meal and a bottle of bubbly for the flight? We might decide, ultimately, that we’re happy with the basic package, but we’d like to know what’s available – and what it’s going to cost us – before we make that choice. And we’d like the freedom to make our decision whenever and wherever suits us best.
This, Ben says, is the new disruptor in the car sales arena: convenience. It’s not the first disruptor he’s encountered throughout his career, but it represents a fundamental shift in the dealership/buyer relationship that’s radically changing the way cars are bought and sold.
Customer experience: the new paradigm
“I call them ‘battlegrounds,’” Ben says, referring to the three distinct platforms that have inscribed car dealerships’ sales strategies over his career. The first battleground was price.
“In 2009, as we came out of the Credit Crunch,” he explains, “dealerships introduced fixed vehicle pricing and price guarantees, and it became a race to be aggressively competitive on pricing.”
Knowing that the price tag was already as low as it could go meant that customers no longer felt the need to negotiate for a better deal. With the Internet now making it easier than ever before to research and shop around, customers began to feel confident in their purchasing power and the industry adapted to reflect this. Fixed prices became the norm.
By 2014, with the expansion of review sites like Trustpilot, Feefo, and Google Reviews, social proof became the new currency in car sales. Manufacturers began to introduce metrics such as the Net Promoter Score (NPS), which measures customer satisfaction through post-transaction surveys. Most touchpoints in the ownership journey were polled – everything from buying a vehicle to car servicing to purchasing spare parts – and scores were made visible to consumers. A low aggregate could easily lead to loss of business – and this resulted in some unintended consequences for the market.
“We were in a world where, effectively, if your scores weren’t high enough, the manufacturers would pull your bonus from you,” Ben says. “So, sometimes, if you had a customer come in that was unhappy from the start, you’d be better off not selling them a car.”
Two battlegrounds: price and customer service. Neither of them, ultimately, sustainable. But with ecommerce platforms such as Amazon, Netflix, and Spotify beginning to put brick-and-mortar retailers out of business, it was clear to Ben that the next battleground would be fought online. However, it would take a global pandemic to fully turn the tide.
Embracing the shift to automotive digital retail
In mid-2020, as the UK emerged from the first Covid-19 lockdown, Ben and his colleague Cameron Wade (now Global Head of Value Propositions, Commercial Strategy and Development at Keyloop) opened the doors on SilverBullet, a digital ecommerce solution for the automotive industry. The timing wasn’t deliberate, but it was fortunate: the pandemic had accelerated an already rapidly growing online retail sphere, and the automotive industry, like other traditionally face-to-face sectors, needed to adapt to global circumstances.
“We all experienced a different way of buying during lockdown,” says Ben. “Click and collect, reserve online, and so on – and now customers have become used to, and expect, that level of convenience in their purchasing journeys.”
That expectation extends to car buying. “Customers today expect an omnichannel buying experience, tailored to their wants and needs,” says Ben. “They want online chat, ecommerce, secure digital signatures and payment, video calls, and online service booking. And some dealerships are struggling to adapt.”
Ben doesn’t believe brick-and-mortar automotive retail will ever become obsolete: rather, that dealerships will become facilitators of car sales instead of the driving force. “You want to touch a car, you want to test drive it,” he says. “You have to take it for servicing and repairs and body shop work. Dealerships will always be a fundamental part of the car ownership process. But gone are the days when customers want to sit in a showroom for hours with a salesperson.”
The future of the car dealership: what next?
To be successful in this new paradigm, Ben believes dealerships must meet customers where they’re at, not where the dealership wants them to be. And that’s where Keyloop comes in.
“Keyloop understands that the old world is disappearing,” says Ben, who joined the company in 2021 when it acquired SilverBullet. “Automotive retail is seeing eroding customer loyalty, new entrants into the industry, different forms of car ownership. Data gets trapped in friction-filled silos so that different departments, different stages of the journey, aren’t linking up. There’s huge uncertainty in the market right now, and Keyloop’s solutions really respond to all of those pain points we’re seeing.”
The modern car dealership should move away from the idea of closing a sale and towards the idea of opening a relationship, Ben says.
“I don’t think in a dealership we manage four walls anymore. What we do now is we manage an ecosystem, and that ecosystem can be online, at home – wherever the customer wants it to be. It’s not, ‘Once a customer walks in, it’s my only opportunity, and once they go, we never see them again.’ There are so many touchpoints that we can own along the journey – and Keyloop products like eCommerce, Leads, Service Hub, enquiryMAX, and all the rest: they’re really helping dealers connect with buyers and deliver that customer experience that everyone is looking for today.”
What will be the next battleground? To understand what the future of automotive retail will look like, we need to look at Gen Z buying preferences today. They’re not necessarily a huge car-buying demographic yet, but, with the oldest members now entering the workforce en masse, Gen Z purchasing power is set to soar – and this is a generation that has never lived in a world without the Internet. Tracy Francis and Fernanda Hoefel of global management consultancy McKinsey & Company call Gen Z “the first generation of true digital natives,” and say they are “transforming the consumer landscape in a way that cuts across all socioeconomic brackets.” This, they add, “extends beyond Gen Z, permeating the whole demographic pyramid. The possibilities now emerging for companies are as transformational as they are challenging.“ [Source: McKinsey & Company]
With this in mind, Ben believes there are two possible new battlefields in play right now: communication and delivery.
“Forget the cars for a moment and look at what’s changing,” he says. “What’s Amazon doing? What are the other retailers doing? Amazon are moving to a same-day delivery model; Asda are reducing their delivery slots to make sure they can guarantee faster turnaround times. McDonalds are building so-called dark stores, premises that aren’t open to customers – they’re only making food for delivery, so their production times are vastly reduced. Now, you can book a McDonalds delivery with an Uber driver and it’ll be with you in 10-15 minutes instead of, maybe, an hour. So I think delivery is a strong contender for our next battlefield.”
As a generation that came of age during lockdown, though, Gen Z also have different expectations around communication. Ben, a father of two, has seen this firsthand.
“Realistically,” he says, “automotive retail needs to be much more geared up for smartphones and tablets. My teenage daughter barely uses a PC at all, but she uses her tablet for everything from maps to chatting with her friends. She very rarely rings anyone unless it’s urgent – everything is text message or Snapchat or WhatsApp or Facetime. The automotive industry needs to meet these new behaviours head-on. And, again, this is where Keyloop comes in.”
Keyloop’s industry-leading dealer management software and applications comprise a range of customer communications options, including chat, email, message, WhatsApp, and more, helping dealerships connect with their customers on the customers’ terms. Plus, Keyloop’s global partner ecosystem incorporates trusted third-party software that integrates seamlessly into the DMS and allows auto dealers to build a tech stack with the communications options that align with their customers’ preferences. Now, with the acquisition of ATG and their suite of best-in-class omnichannel solutions, Keyloop enters its next phase of evolution: the Automotive Retail Platform. This intelligent, composable platform is designed to empower customer-centric engagements across the industry and create a seamless consumer journey that encompasses the entire car ownership lifecycle.
That’s the essence of Experience-First: delivering the CX that meets changing consumer expectations and drives customer loyalty, and it’s why Ben is passionate about the products and services Keyloop provides.
“Drive convenience,” he says, “and you also reduce your costs. Customer behaviour has changed forever, but that’s not the end for car retailers. It’s an opportunity – and the highly successful dealerships of the future will be the ones who embrace that.”
