Removing friction from online sales benefits all

Late last year, when Asbury Automotive Group Inc. rolled out its new omnichannel retailing platform dubbed Clicklane, executives highlighted the company whose technology powers the tool.

Gubagoo, a retail technology vendor that specializes in conversational and digital retailing tools, collaborated with Asbury executives to come up with a product that would enable transactions, not just lead generation.

Asbury CEO David Hult praised Gubagoo for a strong development team and its behind-the-scenes work on Clicklane in a December interview with Automotive News.

"The simplicity of the tool — in 15 seconds, you're getting your trade evaluation and the payoff for the penny from your lender," Hult said.

Brad Title, Gubagoo CEO and founder, called his company's partnership with Asbury "one of the most important decisions we ever made" for the development of its digital retailing platform, which is available to other U.S. dealerships. Asbury's feedback helped Gubagoo add significantly more capability to its second-generation platform, building on the company's origins as a conversational platform provider.

Title, 49, spoke with Staff Reporter Lindsay VanHulle about Gubagoo's technology, the company's collaboration with Asbury and digital retailing. Here are edited excerpts.

On getting into digital retailing:

As the digital retail space heated up, it did seem natural that everything we do within a conversation on behalf of a car purchase is basically the same thing as digital retailing, conversationally. It just became a natural fit that if we built a retail platform, we could actually deliver a guided assistance to the consumer while they're online, live. Websites have a tendency to be cold and lonely by nature, and consumers tend to have a lack of confidence and a lot of questions when buying a vehicle. So the whole idea of bringing conversational commerce and retailing together was a wonderful value proposition that differentiated us. It also delivered impactfully at the dealer level, where they could assist the customer in real time.

On omnichannel retailing, which refers to technology and processes aimed at providing a seamless experience to consumers whether they shop online, in-store or both:

We built functionality into the tools, a complete end-to-end experience. But we recognized that if I went 80 percent of the way online and then I went into the store to test drive, confirmed what I wanted to confirm by touching it and then looked at the salesperson [and said], "Let's move forward," through our system, we can continue right where you left off the night before. So there is no starting over. And that's because we removed all the friction points that would affect why a dealer would have to start over.

On removing friction:

I give you my VIN. I tell you my miles, the condition of my trade. My car's worth $[10,000] to $12,000. Now I apply my trade to [my] payment, pick my F&I products and I think my car payment's going to be $300 a month. When I go into the store now, test drive and say, "Hey, let's move forward," first question asked is, "Do you have a payoff?" "I do. I don't know how much." "OK, give me a half an hour; I got to call the bank." Come to find out, you owe five grand. I'm spending 30 minutes finding that out. I have to go look at what you did last night and restructure it with the negative debt on your trade. And by the time I'm done, I just spent an hour making you wait, all for you to find out, hey, that $300 payment? It didn't take into account that you were upside down five grand. And you spent all this extra time now, and you're disappointed because you thought you had the payment right. And now your dealership has to deal with a dissatisfied customer and get through those friction points. So we removed the friction.

When you enter a license plate, we tell you what your payoff is. So when you take the trade and apply it to the payment, it's penny-perfect because we have included the payoff.

On the Asbury partnership:

It was the most important collaboration we've ever done. They helped show us the light of what we were missing. We were close, but we weren't on the mark. As we build it, they get to test it, they get to amplify the pain that they're having and then we'd fix the pain.

Jackie Charniga contributed to this report.