Looking Ahead To 2025: The Dealerships Of Tomorrow
Picture an automotive dealership in the year 2025. What did you imagine? An automated service garage? Self-driving cars? Better coffee in the lobby?
To be frank, dealerships in a decade won’t look completely different than they do now. Expect evolution, not revolution—that’s according to National Automobile Dealers Association consultant Glenn Mercer, whom NADA commissioned to predict the future, and who presented his findings at the 21st Annual AFSA Vehicle Conference and Exhibition earlier this year.
What Can You Expect by 2025?
Autonomous vehicles are indeed in our future: Glenn forecasts that virtually every new car in 2025 will be fitted assisted driving features, and half will have at least partial autonomy. But the significance of this technology isn’t necessarily in what these vehicles look like, or how they perform, but how they’re sold and how consumers perceive them.
Glenn’s hundred-page report found that some of the most drastic changes for dealerships have to do with economics:
- Digital stores will multiply, but lead to cybersecurity and data management challenges, as well as direct competition from manufacturers.
- The value and importance of physical showrooms will diminish, but not disappear.
- Service will become a primary profit source, “as drivers may renounce car ownership in favor of ‘eternal rental.’”
- Accordingly, your service personnel will matter even more, and represent investments rather than expenses.
- Finally, expect a more complex and rigorous regulatory environment. Greater market complexity means more things to regulate.
What Can You Do to Prepare Now?
A slew of information management and regulatory challenges? A more valuable workforce? Sounds like another reason to use an automated compliance management system.
An automated CMS reduces your dealership’s chances of having inaccuracies and instances of missing information in your system. If you’re still relying on spreadsheets, you’re exposing your company to costly data breaches and missing opportunities to leverage analytics to become more efficient. A CMS that slows you down now will only get exponentially worse by 2025. Moreover, it may no longer even meet the bare minimum of compliance.
Plus, as we’ve discussed before, an automated CMS helps you better retain and engage employees. In a service-based economy, your relationships with your people should be top priority. Keep them happy by supporting their ongoing compliance training.
Best of all, an automated CMS like Compligo adapts to your business and regulatory needs over time, so you don’t need to constantly reassess your compliance program. Learn more.
