Retail Anywhere Clip - Challenges

EL So what are dealers trying to do to get this fully online and online to in-store experience? CW That's a great question. And honestly, it's kind of a hard one to answer because retailers are kind of defining and using digital retailing differently. To some dealers, it's selling a car. To others, it's sales and F&I. And they tend to be approaching it in chunks versus a holistic approach. And then you end up just focusing on one or two things when you need to focus on more of a big picture.

DB Yeah, Chris, I think sales and F&I is the big one now. And if you think about that process, you start online and you get to select the vehicle. Well, then as you get into the process of starting the deal, closing the deal, and then moving to the F&I office, I think dealers are experimenting on how they're going to get that done. And they're trying different tools and different processes. And quite frankly, what they're running into is there's a lot of duplication that they have to do and manual entry. And I think about when I go and do online retailing or online buying of anything, my credit card's typically saved. I don't have to put that 16 digit number in 72 times and I just click and get what I get. And if you think about it from a car dealer perspective, they're manually entering name, address, phone number, email address, 17 digit VIN number for a trade and doing that five and 10 times a day. And quite frankly, it's not seamless. It's not convenient. And it generates frustration for both the dealer and their employees as well as a consumer.

EL To Chris's point, dealers are taking digital retailing in chunks. Which leads to plugging in a whole bunch of different solutions and the end result isn't holistic, right. So what are some of the challenges dealers are experiencing with this approach?

KE Erica, I think some of the primary root challenges are that it's just simply disconnected, right. And the approaches are often very siloed. Dealers are being forced to look at it through every area or every process or every problem that they're trying to solve very independently. A simple example might be the ability to provide an accurate payment. You want to be able to desk a deal and have an accurate payment that also matches what's in your dealer management system, right? While, a very simple example, multiple solutions and fragmented systems that don't speak to one another. That's where we see those inefficiencies come in and where dealers end up having to really sacrifice what's most important to them.