Today’s turbulent auto markets are awash with data-driven insights, but is the true value in the data at all?
An unpredictable landscape
Gone are the days when gut feelings and intuition alone could guide decisions in the car market. Now, stakeholders need access to comprehensive and accurate data to make informed choices that align with their objectives and preferences.
One of the key challenges facing both buyers and sellers is the unpredictability of the market. Political decisions, such as changes in taxation or incentives for electric vehicles, impact consumer behavior and demand for certain types of cars. For example, increased government support for electric vehicles may lead to a surge in demand, while stricter emissions regulations could dampen interest in combustion engine vehicles.
Increasing complexity
Moreover, the entry of new manufacturers adds another layer of complexity. With innovative technologies and disruptive business models, these newcomers have the potential to challenge established players. For buyers, this means a wider array of options but also the need to carefully evaluate the reputation, reliability, and long-term viability of these new players.
Similarly, sellers can leverage data analytics to understand market trends, anticipate shifts in demand, and adjust their pricing and inventory strategies accordingly. By analyzing data on consumer preferences, buying behaviours, and competitor offerings, sellers can optimize their marketing efforts and improve their chances of attracting potential buyers in a crowded marketplace.
"Kaisa data clearly shows that 60% of customers who start off on your auto brand’s website end up buying a completely different brand. You’ve just wasted over half of your marketing budget getting customers to your website, to say nothing of lost revenue from sales, finance, servicing, and future brand loyalty. Bad customer journeys are way more expensive than good ones".
Sarah Klingberg, CMO
The elephant-in-the room
For years, OEMs and marketplaces have been accruing customer journey data, including names, locations, form submissions, emails, vehicle preferences, test drives, and finance details. But how much time and resource do sellers have to build a cohesive picture of buyer’s needs? let alone develop the actionable insights that create effective customer journeys that will need to go head-to-head with competitive businesses and brands.
Multiply all these variables with the sheer number of customers in-market, and you hit the elephant in the room – right in the trunk.
Audience
The solution to scale unsurprisingly is automation, but automation alone cannot provide the positive customer experiences both buyers and sellers expect. The key here is personalization or, in what old-school marketers would call segmentation.
Audience is a tool developed by Kaisa that brings segmentation to a different level. By collecting both on and offline customer journey data it creates multiple Audiences according to a vast number of customisable criteria.
Once you have built Audiences you have personalisation. Now you can build automated workflows to trigger messages between sellers and buyers based on actions, shared, audience traits behaviours, location or preferences. The options are endless.
Now you have scale.
"For many years the company was considered to be a data collecting platform’ but what we knew was that our most successful customers used the data to build workflows in our software to make things happen- send a message, a prompt, make call to either a buyer or a seller to create a better customer journey. So the value is not really in the data at all, it’s in the automation."
Carl Holmquist, Kaisa founder
In conclusion, it’s clear that in Today’s turbulent auto markets and indeed across many other industries and verticals, creating great customer journeys, is less about data-driven insights.
It’s more about insight-driven actions.