In recent years, CRM adoption has accelerated across a wide range of industries, and the automotive sector has been no exception. For instance, in the auto dealership segment alone, investment in CRM technology has reached $6.13 billion in 2024, according to The Business Research Company.
The ability to automate and optimize sales and marketing processes is the reason OEMs, auto dealerships, and other automotive companies adopt CRM solutions. Streamlined customer data management, increased sales and marketing efficiency, and better aftermarket servicing are remarkable advantages of CRM for the automotive industry.
This article covers the benefits of automotive CRM in more detail and provides a brief guide for efficient CRM implementation.
Why implement CRM for automotive?
- More efficient customer data management
Modern automotive businesses gather vast volumes of customer data across a wide range of business software and external touchpoints, including social media channels, email, and websites. However, this data is often siloed in different software systems, which is why it can become isolated within different company's departments.
Consequently, sales, marketing, customer service, and other teams cannot form a holistic understanding of client behavior and preferences, which can lead to customer communication issues and inadequate decision-making at both tactical and strategic levels. CRM software allows automotive companies to improve customer data management by merging data from different systems and presenting comprehensive customer profiles based on it, helping all teams gain a unified customer view.
- Enhanced marketing and sales performance
The economic recession, changes in consumer spending, and other factors have led to a decline in new car sales across many regions. For example, in August 2024, new car sales in the European Union decreased by 18.3% compared to the previous month, which was the lowest sales level in three years, revealed the European Automobile Manufacturers' Association. Apparently, this trend negatively affects the revenues of companies involved in new car manufacturing and distribution.
With these harsh market conditions, increasing marketing and sales efficiency becomes critical for companies to survive, and CRM can be very useful in this regard. Additionally, developing a marketplace app can provide a platform for companies to reach a wider audience and adapt to changing consumer behaviors. The technology enables marketers to understand their target audiences better and create more engaging marketing campaigns that can help a company fuel its lead pipeline. CRM also helps sales reps identify more high-quality leads and convert them into paying customers more efficiently, increasing overall sales volumes.
- Better aftermarket servicing
Aftermarket servicing is on the rise in the automotive industry, as highlighted by McKinsey and Deloitte. By implementing a customer-focused aftermarket strategy, an automotive business can enhance client experience and build better relationships. Moreover, a company providing aftermarket servicing can boost gross profits, which can improve its bottom line significantly.
Companies that want to provide efficient aftermarket servicing need to adopt CRM to automate and streamline this business function. For instance, CRM can centralize customers' maintenance, warranty service, and other types of requests from different channels, be it phone, email, or live chat.
A CRM system can then transform client requests into tickets and help a customer support team manage these tasks more efficiently. CRM can also distribute these tickets among customer support agents automatically based on predefined rules, which can significantly streamline the overall after-sales servicing process.
How to implement CRM in your automotive business?
After considering the reasons for automotive companies to adopt CRM, we should now discuss on how to do it properly.
Determine your CRM needs
Company’s business needs assessment is a critical step in the CRM adoption journey. During this stage, business analysts need to gather requirements of all stakeholder parties involved in a CRM project, especially sales, marketing, and customer service teams, who are the primary CRM users.
Business analytics can run one-on-one or group interviews and ask reps these and other questions:
- What are your day-to-day processes? Is there software that supports and automates these processes today?
- How should CRM software help you manage these processes more efficiently? What specific features would you like it to provide?
- What CRM integrations might be useful for your operations (product lifecycle management, dealer management, business intelligence software, etc.)?
Stakeholders’ answers to these and other questions will help a company define the requirements for a future CRM solution more precisely and narrow down potential software choice.
Evaluate CRM solution options
After an automotive company has defined its CRM requirements, responsible specialists should start studying the software market, select several solutions that best meet the predefined business needs, and compare them to each other. Factors such as out-of-the-box functionality, available integrations, customization capabilities, and pricing should be considered foremost. The solution that meets the company’s needs in these and other parameters should become the prime candidate for adoption.
This can also be the case that an automotive company won’t find a CRM solution that meets its business requirements 100%. After all, the functionality of out-of-the-box software available on the market is typically standardized and limited. In such a case, a company should consider developing a custom automotive CRM from scratch. Custom CRM solutions are built based on the requirements of a specific organization, meaning they can provide the perfect business fit.
Get implementation support
Whether a company chooses to purchase a turkey CRM solution or build bespoke software from scratch, it should not handle the entire implementation process with just internal IT resources. The adoption of a complex system such as CRM is a highly challenging task associated with many pitfalls, and an in-house team may not have enough capacity and experience to perform it properly. And if a project goes wrong or fails completely, a company's CRM investment can be wasted.
CRM implementation can also become a serious burden for an in-house team, distracting it from its direct responsibilities, which can negatively affect other aspects of its work. To avoid the aforementioned issues, a company can partially augment its IT resources with outsourced talent. If required, a software outsourcing company can also handle an entire implementation end-to-end and execute all associated tasks, including business analysis, CRM development and implementation, software integration, customization, and CRM data migration.
Set up comprehensive CRM training
Providing ongoing user training and support is essential for an automotive company to ensure high CRM adoption among employees. There are many training approaches and techniques that can come in handy in this regard. For example, a company can deliver learning materials in text and video format to employees via a corporate learning management system.
Additionally, a company can run live training sessions to help employees delve into CRM functionality in practice. Also, a company can initiate role-based training to teach employees on how specific user roles within a system work.
Final thoughts
In recent years, CRM technology has become critical for many companies, including automotive businesses. CRM systems enable OEMs, dealers, and other automotive companies to manage and store customer data more efficiently, streamline marketing and sales activities, provide better aftermarket servicing, and gain other critical business advantages.
Since CRM can significantly enhance an automotive company’s client-oriented operations and provide it with a competitive edge, its implementation should not be postponed. Regardless of the implementation scenario, third-party consultants can assist a company with its CRM project and ensure more impactful and smooth CRM adoption.
