Embark on a Journey to Unified Driver and Dealer Experiences with Salesforce Automotive Cloud

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By Team Aethereus Perspectives November 28, 2022

Automotive Paradigm Shift

The automotive industry has faced numerous challenges over the years due to its fragmented nature and multiple touchpoints throughout a customer’s vehicle purchase and maintenance lifecycle. Disparate systems and disjointed customer touchpoints could not provide a holistic view of the same customer to understand their needs better. With a wave of changes to business model due to pandemic and the focus on EV/hybrid segments, automakers are leading with digitization and customer-centric business model. They are also focusing on customer experiences more than ever before.

The Quest for Connected Customer Experience

Automotive companies are determined to provide a better customer experience but how do you define that? What is the tangible measure that validates a better, connected experience? Automotive manufacturers need a solution to manage the gamut of vast automobile business and provide next-gen customer experiences at the same time. And the search ends here. Meet “Salesforce Automotive Cloud”, it is exclusive CRM for the automotive industry thoughtfully designed to address the key pain points that the industry has had for several years.  

What is Salesforce Automotive Cloud?

Salesforce Automotive Cloud is a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) exclusively for automotive industry that empowers you to bring together your customers, dealers, OEMs, vehicle financiers and all the relevant personas on a single platform. It is powered by Driver 360 that provides a single view of all your customer transactions and interactions with your business. It provides data models, workflows, automations and industry standards out-of-the-box to get you up and running on top gear.

6 Benefits of Using Automotive Cloud

Here are some features and benefits that will help you tune up your business. Let’s understand it through an example.

1) Get Holistic View of the Customer with Driver 360°

Taking an example, Jennie is a loyal customer of Electra motors, an electric vehicles manufacturer. Electra employees get a complete view of the Jennie on a single page that includes all the transactions and interactions she has made at every touchpoint. Its employees can view Jennie’s complete history right from when she visited the car page on company website, booked a test ride, purchase and service history, etc. They can also set customized alerts for their service teams.

2) View Critical Information on Vehicle Console
Electra sales and service agents can view critical information such as Jennie’s vehicle details, warranties, delivery reports, alerts, next best actions, activities, vehicle milestones, etc., on one single page. Accordingly, they can make informed decisions, anticipate the needs and offer proactive communication to drivers.
3) Keep Track of a Driver’s Household
Electra captures info on Jennie’s household members, the drivers among them and their vehicle history, preferred dealers. With all that data, they provide personalized support, offers, and get a chance to look for prospective sales opportunities.
4) Route Leads Effectively
Jennie has learned on social media that Electra is launching a new electric car and it looks promising. She quickly clicks on the link and lands on the Electra website. With the power of CDP, Electra is able to route Jennie’s lead directly to her preferred dealership because they have already captured that data in the household information and dealer takes it ahead from there.
5) Measure Dealer Performance
Electra effortlessly analyzes dealer performance by region, vehicles sold, etc. They can keep a tab on partner sales pipeline, streamline sales agreements and better manage site visits, demand forecasts and dealer incentives.
6) Secure Driver’s Personalized Data
Jennie and her household’s data is hyper-personalized in nature. With Automotive Cloud, Electra ensures that this data is protected as per global data regulatory compliance. It offers flexible data sharing within the system so no unwanted person can get hold of data.

Unified Experiences for Driver, Dealers and more...

In automotive industry there are multiple personas involved so let’s take a look at how favorable Automotive Cloud can be for key personas among them and how you can provide unified experiences to one another.
1. Driver/ Customer
Starting from interacting with your ad on social media, browsing the vehicle on your website, booking a test ride and finally purchasing the vehicle, you can provide digital, connected experiences to your customers across the entire buying experience. Moreover, drivers can get timely reminders for their vehicle service, policy renewals and warranty expirations.
2. Dealer
Track prospective customer data and all the interactions, likes throughout buying journey in a single system preventing duplicates. Convert prospects to drivers and track own performance. Coordinate with automakers on the sales agreements, demand forecasts in a more streamlined way
3. Vehicle Financier
Fetch customer and vehicle data easily from the system and offer attractive vehicle financing plans. Capture and track vehicle mortgage information in a unified system and maintain history. Provide personalized offers to repeat customers on their next vehicle
4. Service Agent
Driver Console and Vehicle Console puts everything at service agent’s disposal. They can leverage that information to provide best-in-class and personalized service to customers. No information can fall through cracks and agent will have all the insights they need at their fingertips. They can create a Case or perform a recommended action from right within a console

Extend Automotive Cloud with Customer 360° for a Smooth Ride

Salesforce Automotive Cloud is built on the foundation of Salesforce Platform, Sales and Service Cloud. When you opt for Automotive Cloud, you get the features of Lightning Platform, Sales, Service and Automotive cloud out-of-the-box. However, you can extend that with recommended Customer 360 solutions to augment your Automotive Cloud implementation.
  • Rebate Management – Setup Rebates/incentives programs for partners on achieving sales targets
  • Loyalty Management – Create Loyalty program for customers to offer rewards 
  • CRM Analytics – Gain AI powered insights on your CRM data with reports and dashboards
  • Marketing Cloud – Send personalized communications to your customers
  • Customer Data Platform – Get Real-time CRM powered by Salesforce Genie (give link to Genie blog)
  • Partner Community – Create digital experience sites for dealers to collaborate and sell 
  • Commerce Cloud – Develop integrated e-commerce website to showcase your vehicles
  • Customer Community Plus – Create digital experience sites for your customers to track their vehicle, purchase and service information
  • Net Zero Cloud – Let your customers know their carbon emission contribution through their connected cars

Ways to Get Started

Salesforce Automotive Cloud has reimagined the automotive industry experience. It has been one of most awaited products from Salesforce, that was launched last month in October 2022. It is generally available (GA) starting with Winter ‘23 release. Salesforce is working with a select set of customers and partners to help enable Automotive cloud use cases. If this sounds interesting, please reach out to us here to know more about this exciting platform and how it can help you.

*Screenshots taken from “An Introduction to Automotive Cloud” video on the Salesforce Automotive Cloud product overview page

Team Aethereus / About Author
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