Prodej a marketing / Rozhovor

New car in a few clicks

Martin Jahn, Board Member for Sales and Marketing, describes the future of car sales

What made the carmaker restructure its V – Sales and Marketing area?

This is the result of ŠKODA AUTO’s efforts to be even more customer-oriented in line with the Human Touch principle. The principle forms part of the complete Customer Journey and introduction of our Simply Clever solutions into the main areas of our new activities: electromobility, connectivity and digitisation.

Has the pandemic situation accelerated the onset of online car sales?

It has, but it is also something that has been talked about for 10 to 15 years. The common denominator is a lot of pressure to reduce our distribution costs and also the advent of a generation that is new and does more things in a virtual environment. They buy everything online, from books to clothes, so they will tend to buy a car online as well. And they expect to be able to buy it in five clicks. By around 2025, in my opinion, about 25 percent of our sales could take place online in certain markets.

More and more car functions will be controlled from one’s mobile phone. Our long-term vision is to have everything in a single app.

Can a virtual environment replace meeting a dealer and exploring a car in person?

We have to offer everything the customer is used to. That is, virtual reality and a chatbot that communicates with the customer or connects them to our dealership’s representative. In this way, the customer can experience a lot of things online with our product. Today, our configurator is very user-friendly and familiarises the customer with what the car is doing or compares market offers. After seeing the options and deciding what one wants, it is possible to configure the car and pay online.

Do the dealers lose their position in such a system?

Certainly not. We will still need them. We need to have someone hand over the car to the customer and arrange for a test drive, even if they order it online. And even if part of our service, such as a software update, ultimately goes wireless, there are still plenty of things left to be done by the dealer.

What new services can we expect from ŠKODA AUTO in the future?

Very soon, we will introduce our services, such as the delivery of goods to one’s car boot, which already operates in the Czech Republic. Another one is location-based services (services based on the user’s location – ed.), where we inform the customer in their car about a specific offer of goods. This will be followed by the use of driving data, road quality and traffic monitoring, providing insurance tailored to the driver and his car and more. I expect the expansion of gamification in our cars, for example, in the form of adapting the appearance of displays to the driver’s taste. ED

You can listen to the entire interview with Martin Jahn in the next part of the SIMPLY CLEVER PODCAST on platforms like Spotify or here.