From ‘digital’ to ‘modern’ retailing?

The term “digital retailing” helped explain the shift many dealerships experienced in the spring of 2020 as they sought to sell vehicles during a public health emergency that by necessity required people to keep their distance.

Even before the coronavirus pandemic, though, consumers were gravitating toward a car-buying experience that was easier and faster than having to wait inside a dealership for hours to get the keys.

A consensus never really seemed to emerge on what “digital retailing” meant. For some dealerships, it was a checkout button on the website. For others, a digital transaction included some online elements, even if the deal wrapped up at the store. Others described digital retailing as the ability for a buyer to move from start to finish online, even if some documents still required signatures in person with ink.

Even as those variations took hold, the term “omnichannel retailing” began to be used with greater frequency to describe the way many consumers preferred to buy a vehicle — in some combination of online and in person. The language around online transacting is shifting some more, to include the concept of “modern retailing.”

Dealership adviser Ron Frey talked to me about this last year. Modern retailing, he said, is not just the technology to enable an online sale but also the process changes that must happen inside a dealership. It starts with a discussion about the type of customer experience a retailer wants to provide.

Modernizing the sales process to improve the customer experience also means making it easier for dealership employees to sell cars, said Michelle Denogean, vice president of modern retail at CDK Global Inc., which bought digital retailing platform provider Roadster last year and recently surveyed consumers and dealership leaders about the points of friction in the process.

“When people talk about digital retailing, they’re really talking about the consumer experience,” Denogean told me recently. “When we talk about modern retail, we’re talking about how all of your systems work together in order to deliver the best experience possible wherever the consumer is. And that, I think, is the fundamental difference of modern retail — it takes into consideration your entire process.”