How Dealerships Can Get Up to Date with the Automotive Tech Evolution

The availability of automobiles and vehicles now is very different from some decades in the past. Back in the day, dealerships and salespeople could not cover all the surrounding areas and local consumers. Most of the time retailers had to buy a vehicle in another city, or the vehicle was sent to them. Customers would buy whatever a dealership had when they had it available, and as soon as they could. Somebody else could easily walk in with the money and buy it on the spot.

The model, color, and equipment, if they had any, would depend on the shipment the dealership was getting delivered. A visit to the showroom would be quite an event for the whole family, or any person, to experience and enjoy. It was like going to the fair or any festivity - a date to be remembered and a reference in time for many years. This was the scene for most dealerships until the 1990s.

The traffic in those showrooms of the past depended on the financial situation of the dealership, mostly due to how many vehicles could they get, and how often. On the other side, it depended on the capacity of the customers to buy a vehicle with or without any financial backup.

Now, consumers can buy anything online with the use of their phones. Digitization of automotive retail allows them to visit the exhibition, choose the color, model, and equipment available, settle payments and financing, insurance, add to the warranty, or choose any package and pay for it. From there, the vehicle could be sent to the buyer’s address or any other place of their choice. For some customers there is no need to visit the store, saving them time and overall resources.

SMS (Short Messaging Services) communication and automation make services available for customers to purchase any vehicle at any time of the day or night. Text outreach easily covers a bigger area and a higher number of customers since in the USA alone there are over 272 million smartphone users and 98% of all text messages are opened. Dealers can also send SMS at a lower cost because of the small data requirements and flat rates solutions provided by systems like Konect.ai for an infinite amount of inbound and outbound SMS campaigns and responses.

You can also use SMS platforms’ artificial intelligence that can target and reach larger audiences. After the first contact with a customer and the system receives the “interested” response, dealerships can rely on automated responses that are natural and cater to the customer’s request. This and other MMS (Multimedia Messaging Services) keep the sales process going with the chosen communication that fits your department’s marketing, sales, or even service needs.

Either way, or system, now the next step for dealerships to stay up to date is to develop interaction and increase the number of members in their community. Keep informing them about new deals and models, offers, service opportunities, warranty extensions, trade-ins, or any kind of communication to make your business grow and expand. There are many routes for automotive groups and stores to gain a modern advantage in their share of the market.

The Konect.ai technology, focus and research provides dealership teams with the best transparency to catch conversational situations before they could potentially be inaccurate or misleading. Dealers now can rely on automated systems that have an up to the minute answer or a default option to follow under any circumstance, so the communication keeps going and you’re the automotive provider on top of your business without missing a step.

Konect.ai’s execution of analyzing new opportunities, technological developments, new market progress, and applications works behind the scenes for some of the top dealers in the industry. The system’s potential as a tool can benefit a fast-paced and growing industry that’s surprising everybody, now more than ever.

To learn more information on how Konect.ai is advancing technology day by day talk to our team here.

Sources:

• Henion, D. (2022, December 7.) Make These 10 Text Message Marketing Trends Work for You in 2023. Simple Texting. Retrieved February 1, 2023, from https://simpletexting.com/text-message-marketing-trends/
• Image by standret on Freepik. <a href= https://www.freepik.com/free-photo/young-black-businessman-test-drive-new-car-rich-african-american-man_10001488.htm#query=test%20drive&position=39&from_view=search&track=sph">Image by standret</a> on Freepik
• Mannheimer, S. (2023, February 1). 20 SMS Marketing Statistics You Must Know in 2023. SMS Comparison. Retrieved February 1, 2023, from https://www.smscomparison.com/sms-marketing/statistics/