09 June 2014

Our Auto Retail Network seminar on the future of the industry, held at the SMMT on Friday, presented a fascinating picture of the challenges facing us all. From the customer expectations of Generation Y, to the role of digital technology, to opportunities from a connect car: it was all there.

 Some messages were clear.

I guess the most notable was: you can have all the technology in the world but, unless you recruit the right people, you’re wasting your time. So, there was an unprompted discussion about recruitment in the digital age and whether the current crop of sales people are truly capable of serving the next generation of customers.

But some questions remained unanswered.

Future stores will be smaller with a significant amount of space devoted to purely online sales (or click & collect). Yet, as Mike Jones of ASE pointed out, manufacturers continue to demand ever bigger showrooms.

Tomorrow’s customers expect a personalised service with seamless transition between sales channels and devices. Yet we continue to constrain sales staff within tightly prescribed processes that restrict their ability to engage. Digital technology will allow us to build flagship destination stores with fewer, more flexible satellites on a hub and spoke basis. Yet, if Audi City is the future, why aren’t more people doing it?

So the ‘known’ is that we are going to have to change, but the ‘unknown’ is when. More than one speaker commented that the manufacturer (and retailers) who get this right will make a quantum leap ahead. Which leads to my final question: who’s going to be strong enough (and brave enough) to actually start putting some of this into practice. Or, do you really believe we can carry on doing things the way we are?

Rupert Saunders

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Tags: Auto Retail seminar, future of retailing, SMMT, tomorrow's customers