The allure of a digital retailing process for auto buyers is very enticing. Customers expect a digital retailing experience to be similar to their other online shopping experiences. They don’t understand nor care about the complexity of the automobile sale process and often walk away from digital “deals” when they get to the showroom and the numbers start shifting.
How many BROKEN DEALS do you have each month because a customer “purchased” online and the numbers changed when they arrived in the showroom?
Not only do you lose a deal when this happens, but you also get a bad reputation as a dealer. We all know angry customers are the most vocal in social media and on rating apps. They feel the need to avenge their perceived abuse of the changed numbers. They don’t care that they were quoted a 760+ credit score price and showed up with a 540 credit score. They don’t care if your system didn’t calculate the tax and fees correctly, or if the trade value and payoff weren’t calculated properly either. Once the numbers start moving again, there is a high risk of a broken deal and some bad social media ratings.
That’s the risk many dealerships are taking by having “digital retailing” software on their websites that don’t integrate with all their normal showroom deal software. When the customer’s deal is actually a guesstimate that the customer believes is a final deal, the risks mentioned above start to rise.
Full integration with your internal deal management software systems is not easy, and that is why most “digital retailing” software focuses on guesstimates that get the customers to come to the showroom as a lead. Some even market their guesstimates as “Perfect”, until the numbers change in the dealership to protect your F&I margins. I was told by a dealer that they get a check for thousands of dollars at the end of every month from their “perfect” digital retail provider to square up the difference between the online retail numbers and the actual final deal numbers.
CreditIQ wanted to do it right and be truthful about delivering a pencil perfect digital retailing solution. We built our platform to integrate with all the standard dealership deal management tools, desking, inventory, trade, F&I platform, Route 1 and DealerTrack, lenders, and DMS. The customer is presented with an easy flowing all-inclusive online deal process, and the dealer has an integrated and automated (controlled by the dealer) flow that gets a pencil perfect digital deal done in 20-30 minutes.
When the customer shows up at the dealership, it’s to take delivery (not go through a deal revision). Sometimes the customers don’t even want to take a test drive, they just want to do the delivery signatures and drive back home.
If you are ready to provide this type of service to your dealer clients (or are a dealer looking to implement true digital retailing) please reach out to us at – sales@creditiq.com
