April 17, 2025
WHY IS THE AUTO INDUSTRY SO BAD AT USING DATA TO IMPROVE THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE?
I’ve worked in the industry, at a senior level, both in the UK and the United States for over a decade. And I love the industry. But we need to own up to our shortcomings. And when I compare how we use customer data to support the customer experience, we are a long way short of other sectors.
Think of your own experience with other retailers, hotels and airlines. Whether it is online, in person, over the phone or via an app you get an experience tailored by previous activities and conversations. As a simple example many will recognize, I can engage with a coffee shop via their app and based on my previous orders they either know what I want and/or they will suggest that I try something new based on my likes. It is now the norm when organizations communicate with their customers that they acknowledge the history of the relationship. That can be through past purchases, loyalty points accumulated over the years, or as simply as American Express who highlight “Member since 05”.
"American Airlines not only knows all the flights I’ve taken with them over the last 20 years but the ones I’ve taken with British Airways and the other airlines in the OneWorld Alliance"
Why then have I rarely encountered a car dealership doing something like this, with the possible exception of a few retailers of luxury and super-premium marques? The experience we give our customers feels like night and day compared to what the same customers get in other sectors. What’s really going on here?
I’ve heard it said that the sales culture of the industry bears a lot of the responsibility. Most customers only appear every 3 to 5 years, so everyone is focused on trying to seize that fleeting opportunity before it disappears for another few years. There may be some
truth in this, especially on the frontline among the salespeople in the showrooms. But when I speak to dealer principals and managers they know they can generally make more profit if they can secure the after sales and service business of those customers than they will from that initial sale; they also know that many households have more than one car, so if they make the first sale a great experience they’re more likely to get the second.
I therefore have to say the problem is not from lack of want. Many dealers and OEMs are trying to use their data, they are well aware of the potential value that is locked up, they want to release it. Their problem is they can’t connect it. They struggle to connect sales data to service data; data of one person in a household to another, or even to keep track of one person over time because they treat K. Costello who lived at one London address in 2018 as different from the Kim Costello who moved across the street in 2023.
This issue then isn’t dealer culture or competence, it’s from lack of capability due to outdated tech stacks not being able to seamlessly connect with one another. There is no single view of the customer so there is no understanding of the customer needs or their value and no ability to create meaningful, tailored experiences.
The ability to connect customer data across an organization has been around for longer than I’ve been in automotive. My bank connects my current and savings accounts with my loans and insurance products. American Airlines not only knows all the flights I’ve taken with them over the last 20 years but the ones I’ve taken with British Airways and the other airlines in the OneWorld Alliance.
But I can go into two stores owned by the same dealer group and they probably won’t know it, and as an owner I’ll get simultaneous, multiple, communications about servicing my car from the dealer and the manufacturer because they can’t connect my data either. And usually this communication continues long after I have sold the vehicle.
That’s why we built the Pinewood Automotive Intelligence Platform. A single platform that connects the data between functions within a store, between stores within the dealership group and between the dealerships and its OEMs. Because the more data we can connect, the more value we can unlock.
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