Automotive Dealers Shift to Cloud-Based CRM

Car dealerships are shifting from a product-driven to a customer-centric business culture, causing them to increasingly install customer relationship management (CRM) software in their back-end systems to proactively identify opportunities and build customer loyalty, research by Frost & Sullivan found recently. The research firm further expects that byy 2025, automotive CRM will evolve to integrate customer data across multiple retail channels for dealers.

"CRM vendors incorporating smart messaging tools, social media integration, and a predictive analytics engine in their solutions will be best poised to make the most of the emerging opportunities in the market," said Dorothy Amy, senior research analyst at Frost & Sullivan. "Cloud-based CRM solutions, such as Dominion Vision, are gaining prominence due to their benefits of reduced capital costs and lower maintenance overheads. Globally, cloud CRM will gain traction among smaller dealerships and increase penetration to 35 percent by 2025."

Other findings, presented in Frost & Sullivan's "Global Automotive Customer Relationship Management Market, Forecast to 2025" report, suggest that as the omnichannel retailing trend intensifies, automotive CRM vendors will find growth opportunities in the following areas:

• Providing sharp customer insights, better segmentation, and proactive sales and service initiation;
• Delivering cloud-based CRM models;
• Presenting training modules to educate dealers and help them efficiently make use of analytics features; and
• Fostering partnerships with dealership management system (DMS) providers that offer an open integration platform, such as the Auto/Mate.

"The market is experiencing a surge in consolidations, as DMS providers currently lack advanced CRM capabilities," Amy said. "Solutions resulting from the partnerships between open DMS vendors and CRM service providers will help dealerships capture customer data from multiple online retail channels. New-age CRM solutions seamlessly synchronize customer data and analyze it using data mining algorithms to maximize customer engagement and drive profitability for automotive dealerships."