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View from Driver’s seat, driving in a tunnel, with a personalized dashboard projected on the windshield.

Data-Driven Personalization

Speed Up Your Automotive Customer Relationship and Maximise Value with Data-Driven Personalization

It’s not enough anymore for automotive original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to just sell car units – they also need to take a broader, customer-first approach and look at creating and maximizing customer lifetime value.

“Get to know your customer and you can orchestrate quality customer experiences that provide value and meet their needs throughout the entire customer journey,” explains Philip Beil, Transportation & Mobility Lead for EMEA and APAC at Publicis Sapient. “Creating an eco-system that works around their wants and needs is key, and it goes hand-in-hand with data-driven personalization.”

In a recent Epsilon report (a Publicis Groupe company) it was found that 86% of consumers are more likely to engage with an automotive company when it offers personalized experiences like:

  • Storing their purchase or maintenance history
  • Giving them upcoming scheduled services reminders
  • Allowing them to set up recurring car maintenance.

Build a unified customer profile

However, the common challenge that many companies face is knowing what data is available and what do you do with it all.

First party customer data is often incomplete and inaccurate. It’s often scattered across different silos within the organization. Then there is second party data held by dealerships.

“It’s not easy to reconcile activity to a single person and understand where they are in the buying cycle or their intent and desires,” confirms Adam Cannon, International Salesforce Practice Transportation & Mobility Lead, Publicis Sapient. “That’s why Customer Data Platforms (CDP) are needed to enable OEMs to unify information and create a 360-degree view of their customer.”

"It is critical to have all the right data, in the right place, at the right time. Having a full understanding of what your customer wants and when, as well channels to communicate with them, really opens opportunities for revenue creation and upselling."

Philip Beil , Transportation & Mobility Lead for EMEA and APAC at Publicis Sapient

“It allows us to make informed decisions on offerings that can maximize the value of each customer across all revenue streams. It also allows us to select the right customer and create a targeted portfolio of highly relevant services and reach out to them in a personalized manner.” Check out this video example.

Driving Real-time Personalization with a CDP Watch again | loading video duration...

Learn how Merino Cars uses Salesforce to curate meaningful engagement through every step of the automotive buying journey.

Orchestrate quality 360 customer experiences

The final stage is to reach the consumer with creative messaging and media. At Publicis Sapient, we work with our clients to combine a unified customer profile with real-time engagement data, to inform personalized customer journey design and activate automated real-time contact.

This holistic capacity means an OEM can create a highly personalized message on their customer’s preferred channel to schedule a maintenance appointment when it is due, or offer targeted e-commerce email, suggesting their customer might want to buy winter tires, explains Beil.

“With electric vehicles (EV) on the rise, a company could install new features to the car to guide the driver to the closest charging station that’s compatible with their charging system or has the shortest queue.”

Having data driven personalization in place will also give OEMs a huge competitive advantage when it comes to moving to a direct-to-consumer (D2C) model, like Tesla and Polestar have done so successfully.

 

How you can get started

Publicis Sapient’s Salesforce Practice combines strategy, creative and user experience consultants to provide end-to-end support for clients to deliver real-time personalized experiences at scale on the Salesforce platform. Starting with our Personalization Virtual Lab, we can assess your current capabilities and help define your path to become truly customer centric.

Philip Beil
Philip Beil
Transportation & Mobility Lead, EMEA & APAC

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