Get the Picture: Why a 360° Customer View is Essential for Dealership Success

Let’s talk about 360° customer views. 

You may have heard the phrase thrown around quite a bit in the last few months. It’s become something of a buzzword in automotive – and for a good reason. From your marketing campaigns and sales strategies, to your approach towards customer service, a 360° customer view can offer your dealership deep insight on how to drastically improve the way you do business. 

So, what is a 360° customer view? 

Compiled from your dealership’s first-party data sources, the 360° customer view brings together every interaction your dealership has had with a particular lead or customer to create a single, coherent, complete shopper profile. Data is compiled from your dealership’s CRM, DSM, website, social and search ads, and email campaigns in real time to create as accurate a picture as possible. 

In short, the 360° customer view takes a whole jumble of your first-party (and sometimes third party) data and sorts it into a readable, digestible format so you can use that data to create personalized shopping experiences, improve your marketing, and build customer loyalty to help improve your dealership’s bottom line. 

What can a 360° customer view do for my dealership? 

Your dealership needs a 360° customer view for one simple reason: it can help your dealership achieve – and exceed – your business goals while reducing costs. Here’s how: 

Optimize Your Dealership’s Marketing 

When you get to know your shopper on a deeper level, you learn more about their needs and preferences. The details gathered by a 360° customer view can help you tailor your marketing efforts and create a more personalized experience for your shoppers. This deep understanding of your customers will allow you to improve the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns, saving you time, energy, and a whole lot of money.  

Drive Customer Loyalty

A 360° view of your customers  can provide you with opportunities to create excellent customer experiences. Imagine if, say, Mr. Smith comes into your dealership for an oil change. Your team already knows when his car was last serviced and that it’s probably time to swap out his tires, that the end of his lease is coming up next quarter, and that he has been looking at a specific make and model on your website while researching his next vehicle. Armed with this data, you can create a memorable, helpful, and engaging customer experience that will keep Mr. Smith coming back to your dealership – especially when he is ready to jump on his next lease. 

Improve Your Sales Team’s Performance 

Tracking customer behavior and previous engagements with your dealership can provide your sales team with a wealth of information that can help in closing deals. If your sales rep can approach a client after reviewing the last email campaign he opened and the latest VINs he viewed on your dealership’s website, they will be better armed to make a tailored approach, increasing the likelihood of closing the deal.  

Build an Effective Data Strategy 

The 360° customer view at its core is a clear representation of customer preferences and behavior. By analyzing these profiles, you can gather a wealth of information about best practices for your dealership. The data can then help you build a stronger, more resilient business by making data-backed decisions about business operations, marketing strategies, sales strategies and more. 

What data does the 360° customer view show?

The purpose of a 360° customer view is to give you deep insights into your customers, their preferences and their behavior so that you can adapt to meet their needs. 

With a 360° customer view, you can:

• View a shopper’s demographic information 
• Track a shopper’s interactions with your dealership over time 
• Identify a customer’s vehicle or specific VIN of interest 
• Identify which marketing campaigns a shopper has engaged with including email campaigns and search or social ads.

With this information in hand, you can begin to harness your data to create hyper specific audiences for your marketing campaigns, spot trends in user behavior on your website, create unique customer experiences, track which customers are ready for a service appointment or a lease renewal and more. With the power of clean, readable data in your hands, the possibilities are endless. 

How does a 360° customer view work?

The first step in getting a 360° customer view for your dealership is to implement a Customer Data Platform (CDP) or a Customer Data and Experience Platform (CDXP). These platforms are the key to consolidating your first party data sources into one place and creating a clean, complete, clear data source from which to build your shopper profiles.

An excellent CDP or CDXP will also utilize identity resolution technology that will essentially be able to identify multiple leads for the same person and compile them into a single profile. Let’s take a look at a real-world example. Mr. Smith filled out a form on your website with one spelling of his name and later visited your dealership where a sales person entered his name into your CRM with a different spelling. Identity resolution technology will recognize that this is the same person and unify the profiles to create that clear, data-rich profile with a singular customer journey.  

Once your data sources have been unified and cleaned, you can begin orchestrating your data to create audiences for marketing campaigns based on factors such as demographics, shopping intent and vehicle of interest. If you are using a CDXP, the AI powered technology should be able to automate these audiences for your dealership based on your selected business goals. 

Fullpath’s 360° Customer View Solutions for Dealerships

Fullpath’s CDXP provides dealers with best-in-class identity resolution technology to help eliminate duplicate leads and create clear, consolidated shopper journeys. 

After unifying and normalizing your first-party data sources, our CDXP uses the data to populate a dedicated shopper profile for every lead that tracks their entire customer journey. This includes all marketing and ad interactions with your dealership, website activity – including the pages they browsed and converted on, emails sent and opened, vehicles they may be interested in or have converted on, and of course, their relevant contact details.

Our CDXP then takes this data and automates hyper-specific audiences for your marketing campaigns so you can reach the right customer at the right time with the right vehicle, improving your marketing and reducing your spend so you can sell more cars for less. 

If you are ready to learn more about how Fullpath’s 360° customer view can elevate your dealership, reach out to us at get.started@fullpath.com