The end of dealerships, online vehicle shopping, pure players, smart cars… Has the auto sector been speeding down the digital transformation highway? We quizzed two digital auto experts to find out how disruptive the auto industry is about to get…

Our first interview is with Jérôme Jean, Digital & Regional Marketing Manager of Toyota in France. Interviewed by David Robin, Associate Director of Colombus Consulting, we learned about the automotive landscape in the digital space.

Colombus Consulting: Let’s dive straight in. What does a successful customer experience (CX) in the auto sector look like?

Jérôme Jean: It’s pretty simple: it’s an experience that is completely linear — from the search engine or website all the way to the dealership visit. These last few years, Toyota has focused heavily on digital to improve the customer journey. 

It was crucial for auto manufacturers, whose distribution network has not evolved in 30 years, to become more agile. The aim was to offer a renewed buying experience with a mainly digital pre-sale journey.

We thought about how we positioned our brand and our vehicles at every touchpoint. What experience do we want our customers to have in the dealership? And today we have a new challenge: customers show up very well informed and really challenge our salespeople…

Particularly nowadays, competition is so fierce…

Yes, that’s true of other manufacturers’ eCommerce platforms, but also with pure players who have a radically different approach. There is also one thing no competitor can get around: having actual dealerships so that customers can have a live experience and “feel” the product. 

So does that mean the auto sector is moving from hardware to software..?

Yes, absolutely. First of all because you need to add a digital dimension to the dealership experience, which requires having one single database — in our case, Salesforce.

The software is going to continue to evolve fast with smart cars. Tomorrow, diagnosis, preventive interventions, vehicle upgrades — all of those will happen remotely. The auto sector’s approach to marketing will shift increasingly to mobile. We will be able to offer new apps and services to make our customers’ lives easier. Manufacturers will finally connect with their customers on a daily basis.

“The auto sector’s approach to marketing will shift increasingly to mobile.”

Where are we at with online sales today?

The online retail market is gaining traction. All manufacturers, especially in England and Scandinavia, have been testing online sales of new vehicles. 2020 will be a pivotal year with the emergence of online sales platforms. The real question is: what is being sold? Selling new vehicles is the Holy Grail… except that today, the used vehicle market is much more mature. But will it work? I don’t think that online sales will dominate the market or spell the end of dealerships. In my opinion, digital will be one extra sales channel that will hopefully allow us to market to a younger customer base.

Next, our own Geoffrey Vion interviewed Brice Renvoizé, Digital & Experience Manager at SEAT Groupe Volkswagen on marketing, data and CX in the automotive sector.

Contentsquare: How did SEAT restructure to meet the digital challenges of a fast-evolving sector?

Brice Renvoizé: We transformed our digital marketing strategy 2 years ago, with a restructuring of teams based on data and customer experience. Today, our Influence division is responsible for increasing brand awareness and our Digital Customer Experience division is in charge of optimizing the customer journey. The customer journey is changing fast and we’re seeing a decline in dealership visits.

Has this changed your mission at all?

Our objective today is to prove the business value of digital, and to drive more traffic to our dealerships, which is where 100% of our sales still happen. Drive to Store is our main KPI and all our digital innovation takes into account the dealerships as a key part of the buyer journey.

The SEAT ID is an example of how our digital strategy is evolving. This unique client/prospect identifier will remove all barriers between our digital interfaces, dealerships and smart cars. It guarantees a friction-free experience in both the physical and digital world — it’s the ability to keep members in our ecosystem, which includes offering new services.

New services?

Yes, third-party services (music streaming, paying for gas…) are included in a monthly payment thanks to the connectivity revolution in the auto sector. 

On the product side, we’ve already disrupted the status quo by launching a “no strings attached” car. A Netflix-type subscription where you can return/exchange your car and change your mileage — all this in an easy way, with no fees. Every last obstacle in the experience has been removed! With this level of service, we’re answering the needs of the new generation, who is more interested in usage than ownership.

Will people be buying their car online anytime soon?

No, not yet. We all still need contact with a product that remains a unique type of purchase. But digital can simplify the process: online deals with financing offers, estimates for a trade-in…

So it’s not the end of dealerships just yet… But how do they connect to digital?

We can remove the barriers between the two. We measure showroom visits that come from mobile traffic. The information shared during the experience on seat.fr. makes it easier for the vendor to understand the client. 

The experience both online and offline still needs to improve thanks to considerable personalization. The key to personalization will be customer ID and data.  

Can you describe your data strategy?

It helps us save on acquisition and focus instead on conversions. How? By personalizing messages depending on profiles and segments, by way of optimizing touchpoints to increase conversions. Ads we will go even further with the SEAT ID and the smart car. Today, data is used for marketing, tomorrow it will be used for business and service. 

Hero image credit: SergeyBitos, Adobe Stock

Contentsquare promised to show you the money at Shoptalk 2019 and we did. We held an interactive booth that put Shoptalk attendees to work on our wall, in search of hidden insights. Our guests went sleuthing for the code to our secret room, while our robot hung out with some of the visitors. Our team of UX-perts were on hand to demo our fabulous suite of digital experience analytics. And we also reaped a lot of knowledge regarding the intersection of retail and digital. Here are a few things we learned at Shoptalk 2019.

Influencer Marketing is Ramping Up

Influencer marketing, the practice of using influential people for brand awareness, is huge right now, and many brands are capitalizing on this magic formula of endorsement and audience rolled into one. What’s more is that it has the potential to not only raise brand awareness but to up revenues as well. Andrea Fasulo, the head of Consumer Products Marketing at Nickelodeon, divulged that Nick’s partnership with JoJo Siwa, a 15-year-old YouTuber, has increased their revenues as JoJo’s star rose. (The kid’s network added JoJo to their shows, apparel and toy lines). She now is worth about $1 billion and has a YouTube viewership of millions.

The success of this influencer partnership comes from her alignment with Nick’s brand. To infuse the influencer partnership with a feeling of validity, brands are pairing up with public figures who are passionate, or at least interested in their niche and products. In other words, with the right influencers, a business’s brand messaging looks less like an ad and more like genuine interest/usage of their offering.

But brands don’t necessarily need to reach out to big-name influencers; influencers with a relatively moderate to even a small following can go a long way for e-retailers. Cathey Curtis, the VP of Global Marketing for the surf and snowboard gear company Billabong, has revealed that the company’s Instagram posts that feature micro-influencers get 3 times more engagement than those that feature regular models.

Big Data Has Spawned the Rise of Artificial Intelligence

Data proliferation is no longer unusual, with most businesses pumping out onslaughts of data by the minute. The reliance of data is only increasing and when there’s an excess of data, it loses its digestibility — at least to human eyes and minds. That’s where artificial intelligence and machine learning come in. AI is at the fore of both data processing and how data is delivered to us.

Russell Scherwin, the CMO of Watson Commerce at IBM, spoke about AI at one of the sessions. “If you aren’t addressing AI, you’re behind,” he said. AI technology can help you discover the goings on of your website, without having to scout through a tiresome load of data. With AI technology at hand, brands can easily parse through their data and analytics to optimize their UX, personalize the customer journey and understand the most pressing issues regarding their sites.

Personalization is a Winning Strategy

E-commerce consumers are becoming more and more in want of a shopping experience tailored just towards them, or one built closely around their needs. With the constant bombardment of advertisements and brand messaging, usually with personal elements, consumers are looking to get the same kind of experience while perusing websites that are selling to them.

Personalization comes as a specialized strategy for UX optimization, as it will be different based on the different types of customers in the market. While many retailers have relied on creating emails that tap into their customers’ unique shopping tastes and experiences (ie, abandoned carts, product recommendations), there are far many other routes to take on the front of personalizing the customer journey.

Some of these methods include digital shelves, custom products, endless aisles, geo-targeting, personalized upsells, style finders and more.

Bouqs Co., an e-commerce flower seller based out of California has added special features to its site to increase the personalization factor.

These new features include giving customers the option of watching mini documentaries on the site. The documentaries exhibit the details of the farms which produce the bouquets before shoppers buy one. “We’re adding value beyond just the purchase and I think that’s a big part of the future of e-commerce,” said Bouqs founder John Tavis.

Implementing New Service Delivery Models to Meet Your Customers’ Needs

As part of a strategy to continue product subscriptions as well as to gain customers for single purchase goods, retailers are creating new delivery models. The revamping of delivery methods is part and parcel of the CX, or customer experience.

In this way, CX is an amalgamation of digital with physical experiences. The receipt of a delivery occurs in the physical world, while ordering it comes from digital.

Although customers may spend long periods of time scouring e-commerce sites, they may not always convert, not least where a delivery is involved.

Executives from Madison Reed, a hair care company, and Brandless, a food, beauty and personal care supplier, held a discussion on the fusion of digital and physical experiences. A major area of concern for this merger is the implementation of new service delivery models.

These new models include white label options, subscription boxes and various delivery methods to give brands the edge in a competitive retail market.

Shoptalk 2019

Signing off, we want to say that one of the best shows at the junction of e-commerce and retail certainly lived up to its name. Shoptalk 2019 was an outstanding and enlightening experience for us at Contentsquare and the visitors alike. We’ll definitely be back and we look forward to what the future of digital holds.

We recently wrapped up an amazing few days at the NRF (National Retail Federation) trade show, where we took part in panels and shared best practices with some of the biggest movers and shakers in the realm of UX and retail.

Hobnobbing along with Business France, its accompanying 19 French startups and the thousands of retailers, exhibitors and attendees at the conference, our team walked away with fascinating insights about the future of retail, and the intersection of technology and customer experience.

Trusting Data Over Intuition

A major trend for 2019 that has descended upon retailers — both the digital and brick-and-mortar kinds — is the incorporation of data as part of the customer acquisition strategy. In fact, telecommunications giant Comcast Business and its subsidiary Xfinity are partnering to implement data-based best practices into physical stores.

These best practices will aim to offer immersive customer experiences to brick-and-mortar customers, similar to how effective digital customer journeys work in UX. Comcast Business and its subsidiary posited that in order to lure in more customers to physical stores, they will need to design captivating experiences.

That’s where behavioral data comes into the strategy, as it would be impossible to construct these experiences without the relevant data to back them up. Additionally, this data can include consumer insights and employee engagement. All in all, this trend asserts that in order for businesses to survive in an omni-channel marketplace, gathering and leveraging data must be put at the forefront.

Streamlining the Buying Process

With shoppers less and less forgiving when it comes to digital convenience, brands are continuing to invest effort and resources in streamlining the buying process. This too can be applied online and in a brick-and-mortar store. Efficiency and speed are at the core of streamlining, so it is no surprise that retailers have taken notice of its importance to customers, instead of merely to its internal operations.

A streamlined purchase can be achieved by creating simpler cart actions, ones that require fewer steps to the checkout. Improving the overall UX so the customer journey can be easy and hurdle-free from start to finish also contributes to streamlining the buying process online. This translates to forming landing pages with easier paths to checkouts and clearer CTAs.

In a nutshell, identifying visitors’ goals and helping them achieve these goals pain-free is the cornerstone of a successful UX.

International Connectivity Via Payment/ Currency Optimizations

We also took note of the rise of the Latin American market as a key retail target for both brick-and-mortar and pure player businesses. As the Latin American market waxes, it brings with it the international market into the retail playing arena. This begs the question of how to make it internationally, especially when one of your business goals involved breaking into countries aside from the one in which your business is headquartered.

This will prompt businesses to cater to the international community with currency optimization, accept a wider range of cards and expand payment methods (think cryptocurrency or proprietary loyalty points as ways to pay).

In one of the panels, the worldwide fintech company Fexco proposed optimizing currency handling at checkouts. This way, retail offerings can be made easily accessible to users of different currencies.

Fexco provides financial services solutions such as currency conversions, multi-currency pricing, retail foreign exchanges among others. It primarily features merchant products and is seeking to provide data about payments. Thus, even the financial aspect of retail dutifully relies on data.

Contentsquare’s Lessons on the Rise of Experiential Retail

Our own Chief Strategy and Partnership Officer, Jean-Marc Bellaiche, led a speech on emerging trends within retail at NRF, as part of a panel called “The Rise of Experiential Retail.” The discussion identified 3 key trends in retail and what brands can do to stay ahead of the curve.

3 Key Trends in Retail:

1. The acceleration of the convergence between online and offline marketplaces. A digital platform and physical store are not separate entities anymore. Generation Z, which is now in the workforce and has entered the market to buy, are very much the target market within this convergence. Buying online is second nature to them and yet they still value the experience of going to a physical store.

Digitally native pure play brands like the makeup brand Glossier have understood this double-need, opening physical stores to enhance the interactive shopping experience and to give consumers a more first-hand experience with the products and services they seek out.

2. Consumers are demanding more from their in-store shopping experiences. They are looking for more sophisticated, tailored experiences, similar to the kind of personalized experience an online experience can provide. An ordinary, uninspired brick-and-mortar shopping experience will not be enough to draw customers into physical stores. Thus, businesses will have to get more creative in their selling approach at such stores.

3. There is a growing awareness on user data privacy, going beyond GDPR (General Data Protection), an EU regulation which stipulates data protection and privacy for its citizens and data subjects. While this is persistent in Europe, it is has entered the picture in the U.S., and there is increasing demand for data privacy to essentially make user data anonymous, e.g. in the case of major US-based social media brands like Facebook and Twitter.

2 Requirements for Retailers

1. Enrich your online experience to emulate that of a store’s. Stores are equipped with the space and personnel to provide good experiences for potential customers. A store assistant can respond to customer behavior in real time. Additionally, a store can provide personalized events — yoga, an actual breakfast at Tiffany’s, etc.

Create memorable experiences online requires the same observation and analysis of consumer behavior. Analytics help retailers understand what consumers are experiencing and this knowledge can be leveraged by teams to augment the site, and deliver satisfying, converting experiences. Furthermore, since consumers are communicating with a brand through every digital interaction, it’s a sound strategy to incorporate analytics to ease personalization.

Another way to enrich the experience is to apply “retailtainment” to both brick-and-mortar and digital, which author George Ritzer defines as the “use of ambience, emotion, sound and activity to get customers interested in the merchandise and in a mood to buy.”

2. Personalize without personal information. Using aggregated behavioral data instead of the data from a single individual maintains your customers’ privacy while helping brands achieve customization.

In Contentsquare for example, you can tap into the emotions and frustrations of site visitors from the standpoint of population segments, while remaining GDPR-compliant through encryptions. That way, you have the data on your visitors en masse, or at least in portions. You won’t be able to see what they enter in sensitive form fields due to the anonymization of certain information that they provide. With this data, you can then customize your content to appeal to different segments.

Closing Off

The panel closed of with some statistics that got jocular. When attendees were asked what percentage of them have personalized websites, their answers tallied to roughly 25%.

When asked how many of them have what might be defined as the ultimate personalization, a tattoo, the answer was rounded out to 36%.

Personalizing a website is clearly not as second nature to brands and their marketers as tattoos have become to a wide swath of the American population. Clearly, there’s work to be done on the website personalization front.

We’re looking forward to continuing the conversation and collecting even more insights at future conferences like the Adobe Summit and Shoptalk.