The Future of Car Dealerships – The Omnichannel Experience

The Future of Car Dealerships – The Omnichannel Experience Avakash Dekavadiya The present-day’s automotive ecosystem is stricken with an impeccable storm of three key factors – competition, technological advancements, and connected customers. These three factors are catering to new opportunities for customer engagement, innovation, and business transformation. In order to implement these factors, automotive dealers will need to take into account new business models and update the existing distribution channel. As per changing trends, we foresee a confident shift towards the omnichannel business model. The future of the car dealerships will depend on the model where customers will experience impeccably integrated shopping, buying and owning processes regardless of the channel in which they choose to communicate. The shift from Traditional to Omnichannel Experience The automotive retail model has been fairly stable over the past century: vehicles are wholesaled by Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEMs) to dealerships. The transaction from OEM to dealerships is financed by attentive finance organizations aligned to the OEM before the vehicle is delivered via third-party logistics companies to the dealerships. The dealership then sells the vehicle to the customer that likewise finances through the finance companies or through a bank. This model has endured even as the rise of e-commerce has brought remarkable changes to most brick-and-mortar retailers. Regardless of the burst in the online activities, the predicted end of the brick-and-mortar store still hasn’t arrived. Successful automotive retailers have identified the value of a truly omnichannel experience joining together the best of both the physical and the digital worlds and making the transition between the two worlds seamless. The necessity for omnichannel strategy in automotive dealerships is the expected result of the longing to move to a more customer-centric retail model. There are mainly three crucial global trends that push automotive retailers to make a shift towards omnichannel: Connected customers: Today’s customers are increasingly and constantly connected and keep almost every information at their fingertips. In turn, this is causing them to be more focused shoppers who are no longer browsing the dealer’s lots expecting to find their match. New retail concepts: Innovative models like direct-to-customer models, home deliveries and brand boutiques generate new expectations for consumers. Today, automotive retailers need to brace up for these changing expectations as customers find value in these new retail concepts. Digital technologies: The intensification of big data, cloud computing and innovations in core digital technologies need to be used, which allows businesses to more agilely address customer requirements. Omni-channel customer journeys in automotive retail Customers who are accustomed to omnichannel experiences in other industry domains are now expecting the same experiences while buying their next car. In the recent past, the percentage of customers swayed by digital and mobile when making automotive purchases has increased from 40% to 55%. Today, shoppers spend up to 75% of their shopping time online and rely greatly on digital tools. Also, third-party service providers have started to fill gaps in various digital services that the prevailing ecosystem doesn’t cater. While taking into the account that the digital ecosystem forms a crucial source of information and purchase influencer, several automotive retailers are identifying the necessity to embrace new practices. For now, in automotive retail, offline will stay to be an essential component of the customer journey. Offline activities like test drives and servicing play an important role as two out of three customers say that they influence their buying decisions. Even if kicking tires may well have been replaced by clicking tires, it is crucial to note that in the retail environment, customers making use of a digital device in-store are more likely to make a purchase. Why Automotive retailers need to shift to Omni-Channel Automotive retailers must consider offering the experience customers want. Customers increasingly ask for experiences that are personalized, frictionless, immersive and easy-to-understand for shopping, servicing and purchasing. While researching for the vehicle they wish to buy, customers want to make sense of all the available options like new versus used vehicles, incentives, and rebates, financing offers and car sharing. Customers today largely are dependent on third-party websites for such information, but now automotive retailers must become an integral part of research phase or they may risk losing their customers. Researching, learning, and shopping must become completely virtual for the customers. The inescapable impact of digital on customers is now welcoming the industry to admit that the hours-long process of car buying and paperwork is totally obsolete and must be abandoned.Customer Omnichannel Experience Expectations A completely streamlined digital experience, accomplished in less than an hour from the beginning is what customers want today- and what they experience in many other aspects of their digital lives. Automotive retailers must innovate the ownership experience, including after-sales service and in-vehicle experiences and offer relevant value propositions not available elsewhere but only in your digital property. Both, OEMs and automotive retailers play a crucial role in creating this experience. However, the collaborative relationship between them is of the utmost importance for catering an exceptional digital experience. The future of car dealerships is shifting from a product-driven model to a model driven by customer experience, loyalty, mobility services offered by the brand aligned appropriately with evolving customer expectations about the car dealership experience. OEMs and automotive retailers must consider disrupting the present automotive retailer network into a lucrative modern sales and marketing channels that amalgamate the vast arrays of opportunities in emerging technologies with an updated vision of traditional retail supporting clicks, bricks, and handshakes to meet customer expectations. AIMDek is a pioneer in delivering Automotive Dealer Software Solutions, which includes  Intranet for internal communication, a franchise portal for seamless communication between dealers are their resellers/franchise owners and customer experience platform for providing a car buying experience for your customers a memorable one. Learn how to stand apart as a great automotive dealership by reaching out to us at marketing@aimdek.com skip render: ucaddon_next_prev_post

How is Digital Transformation shaping the Healthcare Industry?

How is Digital Transformation shaping the Healthcare Industry? Avakash Dekavadiya Majority of the healthcare service providers and stepping up their game by focusing on digital transformation. With the opportunities digitalizing brings it also bring its challenges. Healthcare organization around the world are different across the globe and each of them has their own pace of adapting and growing. This will depend on political agenda, country government regulations, individual organization process & citizens of the country. Healthcare is moving towards a digital-first approach hence we are talking about trillions of bytes of information each day, which will increase in time. To provide personalized medicine keeping the government norms in check, healthcare provider needs to have a complaint flexible intuitive digital experience platform. Healthcare has to embrace the innovation to transform their service delivery.Challenges faced by the Healthcare providers 1. Patients are demanding better healthcare facilities at their convenience. They need better access to their healthcare information on their mobile devices. To make this possible the providers have to implement a cloud-based portal that enables the patients to access their health records and manage their appointments.Mobile apps for patients makes it easy for them to view their health records and appointment schedule. But makes it challenging to the IT department to manage (multiple device & security).They will need to deploy the digital services to patients faster and securely. 2. Security is the major challenge that provider’s face. They need to comply the healthcare regulations that each country has (USA has HIPPA). In UK, NHS (National Health Services) in 2017 has planned to go paperless. The government assures that there is no risk but we all know security is always a concern if proper measures are not taken. Added to this, IoT & AI will make the cyber security life a nightmare. And by 2020 you will see a huge growth is a Mobile health (mHealth) and wireless healthcare. It has been predict that by 2019 over 40 percent healthcare organization will use IoT biosensors. There are a lot of predictions regarding digitizing the healthcare but it’s very clear that cyber security professionals will be needed during this evolution. 3. Operational challenges will be another concern that the healthcare provider needs to overcome. There will be a cultural change involved along with the adaptive resistance by the healthcare staff. While developing the digital experience platform for a particular healthcare provider (assuming all the healthcare provider will have varied business process. New innovations bring in its own challenge of service delivery complexity. And real-time update needs a competitive and flexible IT infrastructure. Digital Transformation making its way into the Healthcare Industry?Digital transformation will enable healthcare providers to improve healthcare services, patient experience & healthcare staff productivity. Digital transformation opens more opportunity for self-management and empowering patients to have healthcare on their own terms. Now, its what patients can do with the technology rather than what technology can do for them. Improved analytics & reports EMRs (Electronic Medical Records) was introduced in 2009 and transformed the healthcare industry. And it was crucial to be compliant with government regulation and healthcare providers had to keep every patient’s medical record secure and confidential. At the moment, healthcare providers are using analytics to monitor location, mapping & scheduling. Bigdata will play a very important rule here. Healthcare industry will gather the data from the traditional sources and combine it with the new sources which will result in very insightful information. This will make the hospital staff efficient, simplify inventory management and make workflows more efficient. Digital transformation will provide incomparable access to analytics that will drive the change. Improving Patient Experience More people are receiving regular healthcare now and to manage millions of patients is challenging. The healthcare providers need to have a scalable business process/model to cope up with the demands. These digital transformation platform needs to be designed to enable healthcare providers to mitigate risk, implement new strategies and flexible enough to fit into their current business environment. The generation that we have now, it’s different and more tech-savvy. They are not willing to spend time on traditional processes & paperwork. They want real-time update and access to information. They prefer convenience and they will be very quick in letting the world that they did not get the requested information through social media. Hence hampering the brand. To cope up with the demand health care providers need to have aplatform that provides a 360-degree view of the patient in real time and the also provide the patient with an omni-channel experience. Health care providers have started implemented FDA approved medical devices connected to the Internet of Things. They are using it to track and monitor patients who are advised to stay at home due to long-term medications. AI forefront of the patient and clinician experience Contextual intelligence and deep learning algorithms have raised the bar for interactions in the healthcare industry. We must remember the relationship between the healthcare provider and the patient will never go away. AI’s primary objective is to make that relationship stronger. With AI, the technology becomes simpler, smarter and with intuitive user interface makes it more usable for the patients and improves their experience. The smart systems will know the medical history and the lifestyle behavior of the patient and utilize that information to provide a personalized experience. For the hospital staffs, AI will become their partner, helping them support diagnoses and then improve the staff efficiency and enable them to provide personalized treatment or diagnoses to the patient.Speech recognitional has made the capture of doctor-patient interactions and updating the data on EMR behind the scene automatically. Patients and healthcare providers expectations are changing with the technology hence creating a healthcare transformation. However, they still have to comply with the regulations put forth by the government or regulation authorities. With healthcare transformation, data must be very secure. The technology partner needs to ensure that their technology is secure and the data is protected in every environment.   skip render: ucaddon_next_prev_post