DEALER INSIGHTS
Understanding the nuances of dealer operations is essential for optimizing performance and enhancing customer satisfaction. Analyzing sales trends, inventory management practices, and customer feedback can provide valuable insights that drive strategic decisions. By focusing on these key areas, dealers can better position themselves in a competitive market and meet the evolving needs of their clientele.
Situation: Vehicle dealers live in a challenging, complex, data-driven world. Helping dealers thrive meant turning mountains of complex metrics into something they could actually use.
My role: I played a key role in designing the User experience for Dealer Insights, a platform that simplifies data visualization to help dealers make smarter, faster decisions.
Outcome: From managing inventory to spotting market trends, this tool has empowered dealers to focus on what really matters: boosting profitability and staying competitive.
Making sense of it all
Dealers face a variety of ongoing, difficult decisions regarding inventory management and financing. Many detailed and timely metrics are needed to enable the best purchasing decisions possible—from unit sales (brands, makes, models, locations), to manufacturer order cycles, to financing schedules and information about peer performance. Consumer attitudes, customer behaviors, and market trends also inform the evaluation process for marketing efforts, sales tactics, and flooring plans.
It’s a confusing world they live in.
For many years now, GE has offered the dealers it finances access to relevant data about their businesses. But to assemble this data in useful ways, dealers have had to leverage numerous separate applications and systems. To say the least, the process has been complex and time consuming. Better empowering this critical customer segment was an obvious and sizable growth opportunity.
From information to insight
My team began by working closely with customers and the CDF commercial team to gather as much information as possible. It quickly became evident that dealers need more than a single, simplified interface to more easily access information. What they truly need is the ability to evaluate how that information relates in ways that can help address some of their most pressing and vexing business concerns.
The vision became to provide a broad collection of simple, flexible, intuitive
data visualizations that connect a variety of real-time data in insightful, meaningful, and actionable ways.
Now do it in 45 days
To explore this opportunity, a FastWorks MVP (Minimum Viable Product) would be developed and tested with select motorsport dealers. The team conducted a series of customer interviews and field visits to validate our initial hypothesis regarding what dealers most wanted to know. This process uncovered a clear set of concerns that fell into two groups: opportunities (product and market trends) and risks (inventory health).
Data Finds its Voice
Visualizations were rapidly designed around the opportunities and risks, and a skilled development team executed the prototype in agile sprints. The resulting pilot application (site) is a content platform that utilizes a flexible framework and presents each of these visualized “insights” as modular cards.
Each card delivers information in a way that’s easy to digest and act upon, and can be browsed, searched, and organized according to a dealer’s greatest interest. Sets of insights can then be saved and shared, enabling quick, informed business decisions.
AGING | The longer a unit goes unsold, the less profitable it becomes. Dealers can evaluate detailed age metrics and compare themselves to peers in their region.
FREE FLOORING | Dealers have a short window in which to sell units with no finance charges. Knowing when and which inventory is about to leave that window is critical.
MARKETING | Dealers can evaluate the market potential of an area and what would be the best communication channel to use based on third party data.
LIQUIDATION | Trends in the market change fast. Dealers need to stock the right mix of inventory to take full advantage of popularity patterns.
DASHBOARD | Carousel provides a quick way to see all your insights at a high level
Cards are fully responsive, working equally well on mobile devices and traditional desktops. This allows dealers to leverage the application anywhere, anytime. Above are samples from the initial set of insights developed for the BETA release.
DETAILS | We provided different ways to dive into the details
SHARING | In the future people can update one display using another to share information
MESSAGING | Get notifications around what matters to you most in the way you prefer
Outcome
Initial customer response has been very enthusiastic with dealers realizing the potential to improve their business through faster, more insightful decisions.
As the project moves forward it will continue to rapidly evolve. The initial focus will remain on creating and refining the most useful and effective insights possible. If customer scores remain high, focus will shift to maximizing adoption rates, freeing the modular content from the confines of the site, and working towards a more flexible delivery model to broaden GE’s industry footprint.