Joe Gumm of CBT News speaks with Bob George, Senior Director-Products, Websites and discusses how the platform at Dealer.com is meeting the expectations of online auto shoppers by offering personalized shopping experiences and helping users save time in finding the auto they want.
What are consumer expectations for shopping online?
A lot of consumer expectations are driven by e-commerce.
Consumer Expectations
- They want Internet to make their lives easier
- They want data to follow them
- They want personalized results
- They want the Internet to work for them
George says, “We want to make people’s lives easier. And we want to use data in very powerful ways to connect properties and the search experience, but we need to do it in a way that is useful to the consumer and removes the “we’re following you around” creep factor. It is a bit of a paradox and something that dealers have to thread in our industry.
Filling the Gap
How do consumer expectations translate to what dealerships are offering right now? Many dealerships are dipping their toes into personalization, and a lot of vendors and third parties use data to make your customer’s lives better and easier. The question is, how you take data from a site where a shopper journey starts and then from a site where you pick it up and from the dealer site where the shopper journey might end.
“There is a lot of opportunity here to connect the dots to catch what shoppers are doing … across our network of Dealer.com websites,” says George.
“We are trying to tie more of the workflow that happens across these properties together, so when people land on the Dealer.com … the majority of shoppers get a personalized experience because we have data from the other properties.”
Dealer.com product benefits include providing the customer with a personalized experience and personalized data that they can find because it is presented to them. Just as important is efficiency for the dealership in deploying a personalized experience because only one set of content is created.
