Working with over 11,000 dealers, Auto Trader, the UK’s most popular motoring website, wanted to more effectively communicate with its large B2B audience, to gain valuable feedback and customer insights.
The challenge
Auto Trader had long been communicating with its dealer customers via email, direct mail and phone, but wanted to build a platform to better communicate with these customers digitally during their online engagement with products and services within the dealer portal. In order to create achieve this the business chose to create its own B2B social media platform: the Dealer Community.
The solution – the (private) social network
It was decided that the social network would launch in beta form to gauge dealer appetite and engagement of the community site. A select number of dealers were asked to join this trial phase. Dealer Community was officially launched in March 2011, following completion of a successful beta phase in February and now, under a year later, boasts over 6320 members.
The private social network was designed to allow Auto Trader to connect and collaborate with dealers, as well as for dealers to collaborate with each other. For example, using insights and innovation to test new product concepts and improving customer care by providing an environment to share usage tips. Dealers were also given the opportunity to chat in the dealer lounge area or access self-serve FAQs and tutorials from the support and best practice centre.
The programme is managed by Auto Trader’s innovation team, which was made up of the team of specialist product managers and marketing personnel from across Auto Trader’s business units. The innovation team monitored and responded to suggestions and requests from within the Dealer Community, before embarking on a collaborative process to hone and refine new or updated products.
Since launch, the Dealer Community has seen success in a number of areas; it is hugely popular with Auto Traders’ customers and continues to grow in membership month-on-month. Changes have been made to best practice in direct response to dealers’ discussions and suggestions as well as new products developed.
The results – encouraging product development
The Dealer Community was used to road test a number of new concepts for products, allowing dealers the opportunity to feedback on both the general idea and the execution. One of the most successful innovations to come from this dialogue was the ability to generate invoices from within Dealer Edit. The concept generated a large amount of feedback from dealers and this helped to shape the look and feel of the final product. When the product launched in August 2011, there was positive feedback from dealers, commenting that it saved them time and made the process much easier to use.
Daniel P. Begg, AffIMI – Pyper’s Car Sales, “Having seen the Dealer Edit concepts for the invoicing and customer detail retention database on dealer community, I felt some changes could be implemented to ensure that dealers got the maximum benefit from the system. After engaging with the product manager, the alterations were made and I was involved in the process from concept through to development stage. I am pleased to say the new Dealer Edit features are a fundamental tool in enabling dealers to capture customer details through to invoicing a stock car. The Dealer Community provides an ideal platform for dealers to share ideas – which will allow the industry to move forward as a whole and enable technological advances to benefit dealers.”
In a few short months, the Auto Trader Innovation Programme has delivered new functionality in Dealer Edit to help dealers manage part exchanges and customer invoicing, as well as a reinvigorated the monthly PULSE report.
Tracey Green, head of product (Dealer Desktop) – automotive marketing platforms at Auto Trader commented, “The Dealer Community offers us a platform to connect and collaborate directly with our customers. Capturing dealer feedback on new product and service concepts is very important to us and the community offers a range of great tools that make this a simple task for dealers and product managers alike. We have already seen a positive response to the site with many dealers offering great ideas and feedback across the product range.”
Next steps
Auto Trader’s Innovation Team will continue to build on this success, using the Dealer Community to help shape and develop new value-added services for its customers. Dealers from within the community are invited to identify, test and feedback on new and existing product innovations to ensure dealers maximise the value of advertising on Auto Trader.
