By Jane Steen, Head of Engagement at ETL.
Most organisations talk about “the customer relationship” as if it lives in one place. In practice, it’s often spread across several systems, run by different teams or even different companies, each holding a slightly different version of the same person. That can be manageable until the commercial arrangement around the customer changes, and suddenly all parties need the data to agree.
The automotive agency model is a good example of this at the moment. Under the traditional model, the retailer buys the car and sells it on, and the customer relationship largely sits with them. Under the agency model, the manufacturer sets the price and holds the sales contract, and the retailer becomes an agent paid a fee for handling the sale. Several manufacturers have made the move in the UK and Europe, and some have since stepped back from it, so the debate is far from settled.
Much of that debate has been framed as a question of who owns the customer. That’s a fair question commercially, but there’s also a data element to it.
Contractually, the manufacturer may now hold the sale. Operationally, the customer still books a test drive through the retailer, collects the car from them and comes back to them for servicing, all of which is recorded in the dealer’s DMS (dealer management system). Financial data may sit in the manufacturer’s finance company, and connected vehicle data flows somewhere else again. So the relationship the manufacturer now “owns” is actually assembled from records in systems it doesn’t run, often across a network using several different DMS platforms. Owning the customer on paper isn’t quite the same as being able to see them.
What we usually find in these situations is that moving data from one place to another isn’t the hard part. The hard part is recognising that Mrs Jones in the order system, J Jones in one retailer’s DMS and the family email address on a service booking are the same person, and knowing which record to trust when they disagree. Matching and reconciling records rarely makes it into a strategy meeting, but it decides whether or not a single customer view works in practice. Consent is tricky to sort out too. Marketing permission captured by a dealer at the point of sale doesn’t automatically travel with the record, and it’s important to be clear about which party is responsible for what while the agreement is being drafted.
None of this is unique to the automotive industry. Any organisation where one customer is served by several parties, whether that’s a franchise network or a group built up through acquisitions, runs into the same thing. The useful lesson is to treat the relationship as an integration question before treating it as an ownership question. That starts with knowing where each part of the customer record is actually created, and which system should be treated as the authority when two of them disagree.
We’ve spent a lot of time on this with manufacturers drawing data from dealer networks. In one project for Snap-On across France, Belgium and the Netherlands, it meant bringing overnight extracts from I’Car, DCSNet, Carfac and EVA into a single flow. Every system had its own history, and most of it needed a painstaking reconciliation process.
Here’s a practical exercise: pick one real customer, ideally one who’s been with you for a while, and trace them through every system that holds a record of them. Note how many versions you find and where they differ. It might take a little while, but it usually tells you a lot about the state of your data.
The agency debate will probably carry on for a while yet, and the commercial models may keep shifting. However it settles, the manufacturers and dealers in the strongest position are likely to be the ones whose systems can agree on who the customer actually is.
If you’re working through this on either side of the relationship, it’s the kind of thing we’re always happy to talk over.
