Why Car Companies Shouldn't Wait For Autonomous Driving to Emulate Uber

Sometime in the not too distant future, your personal car experience is likely to be just like today’s Uber experience…you will pick up your smartphone and summon your car. Your phone will notify you when it is at the door, ready to pick you up. When you arrive at your destination, it will drop you off and go park itself.

And while autonomous driving will transform everything about driving and owning cars, car companies need not wait until then to look to Uber for ideas to transform their customer experiences.

Uber has been so successful, even in the face of regulatory challenges for one simple reason…Uber used insight and technology to create new and better digital points of experience to eliminate or augment significant physical pain points in the conventional taxi/limo experience.

And while the car business has come a long way from the days when dealers threw your car keys on their roof to force you to buy a new car, the automotive purchase and ownership experience is still fraught with more pain points than most other categories. And in some cases it has taken third party disrupters, like True Car to bring relief to an obvious pain point, lack of pricing transparency, that automakers easily could have eliminated themselves.

So what can car companies learn from Uber? How can they pre-empt third parties and fend off new competitors by taking back and transforming the customer experience? How can they leverage technology and customer behavior trends in their favor?

While most car companies have created a few customer apps, they tend to be 'one offs' such as captive finance apps that help manage payments, or electric vehicle apps that help monitor range and charging levels. Because Uber realized that the actual ride was only a fraction of the entire experience, they developed a seamlessly holistic app that guided their customers and drivers through the entire process, providing the right information at the right time.

A fresh look at the process in a holistic and empathetic manner will allow you to discover new opportunities architect an all-new, technology driven customer journey that will drive better and more frequent brand experiences that will engender greater customer satisfaction and loyalty. 

Some things to look for:

Address disconnects and pain points

Collaborate with your dealers to tackle the most brutal pain point of all…the F&I, (finance and insurance) process. Uber understood that cash was inconvenient; that tipping could be confusing; that splitting a fare could be potentially embarrassing; so they stepped in to address these issues. 

Today’s buyers are used to on-demand, transparent experiences, while F&I remains largely a mysterious, intimidating, time intensive process that can leave the customer second-guessing. The benefits of an app driven F&I experience that confirms approval and payment terms prior to stepping into the dealership include higher levels of customer satisfaction, increased captive finance penetration, better traffic quality and greater dealer operational efficiency. All of which can be accomplished without sacrificing dealer autonomy or F&I income. 

Other areas to consider: trade in valuation, service appointments, recalls, etc.

Look for new opportunities to add value throughout the ownership cycle

Automakers should view the entire purchase and ownership experience through the lens of their customer's world. How does your car fit in their lives? How can you help to create better customer experiences?

Should your app monitor gas mileage? Or better yet, should it anticipate when you need to fill up and direct you to the gas station with the best gas prices? 

Should it help you find a parking garage? Or better yet should it contact an on demand valet to meet you at your destination and park the car?

Ask customers  to rate every interaction with your brand and make the results public

While a few of your dealers might bristle at the thought, the good ones will view this for what it is...a marketing opportunity for their dealership to garner positive word of mouth and greater levels of trust. And that trust will halo back from the dealer to your brand. It will also finally force 'problem' dealers who are hurting your brand to raise their game or go home. This should eliminate the need for the age old 'come to Jesus' interventions that rarely yield positive long term results.

Think in the future tense

It is important to also remember that Uber is not only a technology play that eliminated pain points, but that Uber is also a lifestyle play that capitalized on the emerging sharing economy to develop a peer to peer business model. Automakers should be looking for insight into other nascent trends that will create new opportunities for their business, and allow them to be authors of history of the future.