Column: Maximizing the potential of automotive retail technology

Who has purchased or been given new technology doodads without ever fully learning how to maximize their potential?

I'm guilty of this. Years ago, I bought an iPad and gave it away after barely touching it for more than a year. I could have used it to send emails and surf the web, but it had all this other functionality that baffled me, so I left it alone.

It seems that many auto dealerships are no different.

Roughly 84 percent of dealers have adopted a digital retailing tool of some kind, but only 30 percent are maximizing its use in the store, according to dealership technology giant CDK Global Inc.'s 2023 Friction Points Study. Completed in partnership with the NADA Academy, the report looked at customer pain points in the car-buying system.

What the digital technology adoption statistics show is that dealerships are using digital retailing products as online tools, but relatively few also use them in the physical store, said Anu Roberts, CDK's senior director of product marketing.

In other words, dealers have existing processes they follow in the store when a consumer arrives. They gather related information from digital retailing tools but they're not linking that with their in-person sales process, according to Roberts. The disconnect has existed in the industry for some time, she said.

"They're not actually connecting it in the store experience," Roberts said.

Vendors can counter this by sharing data with dealers that shows how these tools can make online-to-in-person sales processes more efficient, she said, such as improving customer wait times.

There's also the notion of training, according to CDK's 2023 Trendsetter's Guide to Automotive Retail report. In this survey, 49 percent of 311 dealer respondents from the U.S. and Canada said they were "trendsetters." CDK found that nearly half of these dealers invested in training last year. In turn, most of them said training had a huge impact on their business, and they planned continued training investments in 2023, according to the report.

I wonder if more training would help dealers maximize their technology use?

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— Mark Hollmer