What is the role of CRM in the automotive industry?
From rising customer expectations to constantly changing supply chains, the automotive industry comes with its own set of unique challenges. In order to make a mark in today's automotive sector, industries need a CRM that can manage and organize an ever-growing number of leads, harness the power of artificial intelligence to reach the right customer with the right context, provide customers with highly personalized brand experiences, and utilize self-service models to keep end users updated about the products and services on offer.
Key features automotive companies should look for in a CRM
- Single system omnichannel communication
- Social media management tools
- AI-enhanced lead and deal management
- 360-degree customer view
- Real-time notification system for customer interactions
- Dealership and inventory management
- Sales order and purchasing order generation
- Billing and payments
Why choose Zoho CRM for your automotive business?
Dealerships
Run omnichannel marketing campaigns and capture leads directly when they land on your website for test rides. Segment, score, and nurture leads, and use actionable intelligence to ensure your sales reps make relevant, on-point sales pitches. Utilize purchase and service histories, as well as activity patterns, to cross-sell and upsell
OEMs
Provide an end-to-end personalized experience, from nurturing a lead who is researching you on the OEM website to the test drive and vehicle purchase at the dealership. Grow your dealer network, build better dealer relationships, and understand customer behavior through advanced analytics.
Garages and workshops
Manage the scheduling of regular maintenance services and keep your customers informed about the current stage of their service. Assign jobs to your team and track them, use customized job sheets to guide your teams, and maintain up-to-date service catalogs. View all jobs, estimates, and invoices in one place to maintain an updated customer profile
Why is Zoho CRM good for your automotive business?
Build personalized experiences
Engage leads at the right moment with the right message across multiple channels.
Manage servicing and repair
Assign and track jobs, schedule service appointments on time, and dispatch jobs with ease.
Keep your inventory updated
Manage vehicle and item stock, track orders, and generate invoices from within CRM.
Streamline test drives and vehicle selection
Distribute leads in round-robin, streamline the test drive phase end-to-end, and follow up on cold leads.
Make data-driven decisions
Identify trends, market patterns, and customer behaviors, and leverage that data to improve your bottom line.
Offer self-service portals for vendors and customers
Keep your customers and vendors in the know and keep them updated with their service stage, invoices, and updates on a service order.
The preferred choice of leading service based businesses
Top rated features for automobile industries
With over 12 years of expertise in the CRM software domain, over 250,000 happy businesses place their trust in Zoho CRM to streamline complex business processes, drive revenue, and build lasting customer relationships.
Boost your outreach with personalized, automated campaigns
- Make selling social
- Send mass email campaigns
- Google Ads Integration
Engage with your audience on social media
Connect your social media handles on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram to monitor conversations about your brand, and jump in to engage with prospects where your presence is needed. Zoho CRM lets you search for relevant keywords and shows if accounts using those keywords are your customers, prospects, or someone new to your business.
Send event invites using mass emails
Create e-invites as email templates and schedule them to be sent to contacts in your database whenever an event is coming up. For example, if you're planning an event in New York, you can select the city criteria as "New York," and if the event is targeted towards young professionals, you can use advanced filters to send out invites to all your contacts aged 18-25.
Run Google Ad campaigns and
track them in your CRM
Zoho CRM combines CRM data with your Google Ads information so you can figure out which keywords bring in the most qualified leads. Put together online and offline conversion data for a clear view on sales numbers and spend your advertising budget where it counts the most to get a better return on your investment.
Convert test drives into deals
- Capture leads with webforms
- Setup workflows
- Instant sales notifications
- RFM segmentation
Capture leads through webforms
Never miss out on any high-intent lead visiting your website. From landing pages to contact forms, capture customer information in CRM directly from your website. Zoho CRM offers both customizable and prebuilt web forms that turn your marketing campaigns into lead generation machines.
Personalize lead nurturing based on intent
Every lead segment has a different buying intent. Offer a personalized buying experience by setting up multiple workflows in Zoho CRM—one for test drives, say, and another for maintenance services—and send out relevant emails to all your leads.
Keep your sales reps in the know
New lead trying to contact you with a query? SalesSignals keeps your sales reps in the know by notifying them when a high-profile lead visits your website, opens your email, or mentions your brand on social media.
Segment customers and target them with relevant sales pitches
Segment your customers into big spenders, frequent purchasers, and active engagers based on RFM. Doing so helps you gauge their lifetime value, identify upsell and cross-sell opportunities, and run personalized campaigns to improve customer engagement.
Schedule and dispatch
car servicing with ease
- Manage jobs
- Track appointments
- Maintain service catalogs
Assign and track jobs
Assign jobs to your team based on custom rules such as job type and location, or assign them randomly with round-robin. Your team will receive alerts about assigned jobs. With customized job sheets, you can ensure that your team records necessary information before they mark a job as completed.
Schedule appointments on time
With Zoho CRM, you can book customer appointments that can be rescheduled or cancelled on the go. Define the availability of your services, assign the right staff when an appointment is made, and provide the job sheets needed to mark the job as complete.
Maintain service catalogs
Let your customers access an e-catalog of your services inside Zoho CRM with Portals. Define each service, set dates and times for the availability of each one, and assign staff to handle and deliver them.
Ramp up your upselling and cross-selling
- Cross-sell with context
- Predict repeat purchases
- Focus on deals that matter
Cross-sell with context
Certain products and services are often bought together, even if they aren't necessarily sold as a bundle. For example, if someone buys a car, they'll probably be interested in annual scheduled maintenance, too. Zoho's AI assistant, Zia, maintains a list of products that people are likely to buy and makes recommendations based on previous purchases that similar contacts have made.
Predict repeat purchases
If you're selling consumable products that require regular re-purchases (like engine oil or coolants), Zia can offer your sales reps recommendations about products that customers might buy again after a set time. Is their engine oil about to expire? Use that opportunity to reach out!
Focus on deals that matter
Not all deals move at the same pace. A deal that has been pending for ages might be on the verge of closing. A lead that you thought was a sure thing might be left unattended. Zia defines these records as “trending up” or “trending down,” depending on whether they’re becoming more likely to win or lose.
Portals to bring OEMs, dealerships,
and customers together
- Sell online with E-catalogues
- Collaborate with portals
Bring the dealership to the
customer with e-catalogues
Let prospects browse through your products and services at their leisure through portals that are customized with your company's branding. Create an ideal space to show your prospects exactly what you're offering by styling your portal with the Canvas view to create a picturesque display of your records with images, tags, color codes, and more.
OEMs and dealerships can collaborate to meet customer demands
OEMs and dealerships can save time and resources that were previously dedicated to status calls and emails with a dedicated portal. OEMs can utilize this streamlined channel of communication to ensure that order conflicts or disputes are quickly resolved. Dealerships can get a consolidated view of all the sales orders that they're associated with, and they can leave comments if there's a change in their order.
Maintain customer and
client records in one place
- Document management
- 360-degree customer view
- All your finances in one place
Document management
Host a repository of your valuable collaterals within your CRM for quick access and accelerated collaboration among teams. Use Zoho CRM's role-based security to get the right documents into the right hands.
360-degree customer view
Keep track of your customers emails, telephone conversations, and social media interactions, along with invoices, notes, payments, existing subscriptions, attachments, and support tickets—all in one place.
All your finances in one place
Never lose track of customer interactions and payments by viewing all jobs, estimates, and invoices in one place.
Advanced analytics for making
informed decisions
- Identify your core audience
- Get your team up to speed
- Build accurate forecasts
- Executive insights
Identify your core audience
Identify areas of growth by comparing success rates across different regions, sources, marketing events, and even individual sales reps.
Get your team up to speed
Identify the best performers in your sales team by tracking them across various parameters—from average conversion time to rep-specific deal history. Audit the live chats answered this month, check-ins by individual salespeople, and even lead conversion numbers across different lead owners.
Make data-driven decisions with
executive insights
As a sales manager, you have a lot on your hands at any given time. Zoho CRM's analytics help you keep yourself informed on the general sales health of your organization by keeping the indicators you frequently track at your fingertips.
Build accurate forecasts
As a sales rep, in order to reach your monthly targets, it's important to focus on how much you've sold already, as well as the number of sales opportunities that are still available. At the same time, you want to look into the future to make sure you have enough qualified leads to work with for the next month.
Connect with customers on the move with Zoho CRM Mobile
Get the most out of your day
Check the most efficient sales route to navigate to your customer's location. Check in at the client's location to record your visits and maximize selling time on the road.
![Check the most efficient sales route to navigate to your customer's location]()
Stay on top of your day's activities
Plan your work day to stay on top of your day's activities. Whether it's talking to a customer, negotiating a deal, or sending out an email, get an overview of all your upcoming activities..
![Stay on top of your day's activities]()
Collaborate on the move
Post the status of your tasks and keep your sales managers informed of your progress. Keeping them informed of their team's progress can let them guide their team with valuable insights at crucial deal stages.
![Collaborate with your team to share insights]()
Integrate with the apps you use everyday
Seamlessly integrate with more than 300 popular business apps and let your CRM talk the same business language as yours.
Disclaimer: Zoho CRM is not an out-of-the-box vertical CRM solution. It is an industry-agnostic CRM platform that can be customized to suit various industries. The capabilities and solutions showcased above are a result of such customization.