Over the past couple of months I\u2019ve been shopping for a new car.\u00a0 I\u2019m doing a lot of miles these days as work is 50 miles or so from home, and my old Peugeot just isn\u2019t great doing a hundred miles a day.\u00a0 Unfortunately my own indecision has seen me bounce between different cars on almost a daily basis!\u00a0 I just can\u2019t decide.<\/p>\n
Whilst I\u2019m sure my girlfriend is probably very bored of me announcing different cars I intend to buy, talking to the various dealerships and seeing how they work has been quite interesting. It\u2019s actually surprised me how there seems to be a curious separation between car companies web presences and their dealerships on the ground.<\/p>\n
These days pretty much any information you could want to find out about a car is on the web somewhere.\u00a0 If you want to read reviews there are sites like Drivers Republic<\/a>, Evo<\/a>, 4Car<\/a> or Autocar<\/a> that offer one off reviews and long term reports.\u00a0 Lots of marques have owner run forums where you can read about day to day life with the car you\u2019re interested in.\u00a0 And of course the company\u2019s own websites have all the spec\u2019s and configuration tools to pick out what options you\u2019d want and the retail costs.\u00a0 I say retail costs because you can use places like Drive the Deal<\/a> or Broker4cars<\/a> to work out what a good price might be and how much discount you should be able to get elsewhere.<\/p>\n With all this info available on the internet by the time you actually speak to someone at your local dealership, the chances are you probably know what you\u2019re after and just want to see it in the flesh and take a test drive.\u00a0 It seems to me that at the moment car dealerships aren\u2019t setup to deal with customers in this situation.<\/p>\n Often I\u2019ve found that they\u2019re closed after work and run a skeleton crew of sales people at weekends, just the sort of times people are able to drop in.\u00a0 Last Sunday I tagged along with a friend who is looking to get a new car.\u00a0 We went to four dealerships, one was closed, and the other three had a single salesman trying to deal with more people than they could cope with.<\/p>\n Most manufacturer websites will let you configure yourself a car \u2013model, colour, options etc – and then save it for future reference.\u00a0 Despite having this information about exactly what the customer wants, so far I\u2019ve none of the dealers I’ve spoken to\u00a0have had the ability to recall that saved spec into their own systems.\u00a0 Each time I\u2019ve had to run though the whole process again, using a different system, with some poor sales guy \u2013 wasting both our time.\u00a0 In fact to be honest the sales guys add very little value to the process, other than being someone to negotiate with.\u00a0 Having an IT background its a business process crying out for some integration.<\/p>\n From my perspective as a customer, it would seem like the car companies should try to reinvent the way they sell their cars.\u00a0 I don\u2019t think it would even take that much effort.\u00a0 Just by shifting opening hours and making better use of the IT systems they already have they could massively improve the customer experience.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From my perspective as a customer, it would seem like the car companies should try to reinvent the way they sell their cars. I don\u2019t think it would even take that much effort. Just by shifting opening hours and making better use of the IT systems they already have they could massively improve the customer experience.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,5],"tags":[525,149],"class_list":["post-442","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cars","category-home","tag-cars","tag-web","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/442","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=442"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/442\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":448,"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/442\/revisions\/448"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=442"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=442"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/refraction.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=442"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}