Integrating Digital Retailing: Allocate staff and adapt your showroom process

Read this blog post in French.

As our series on integrating digital retailing winds down, we hope you’ve considered some of the more overlooked aspects of digital transformation. This week, we look at the final two points in Shane’s ten-point checklist: how to decide which staff are necessary for your digital retailing integration, and how to adapt your showroom to the new process.

9. Staff allocation
As the saying goes: No man is an island. When you integrate digital retailing into your dealership, you must also integrate your staff alongside it. Consider which staff members at your dealership need to be involved, what their role will be, and how you will train them. How many staff members will need to be involved in the online buying process, and how will they focus on that process alongside their usual job responsibilities? Are they responsible for incoming online shoppers for their entire shift? Will all of your salespeople take online purchasing leads, or will you form a special team? How will you bring the accounting team into the picture? Make sure you form some solid answers to these questions as part of your business plan. It’s important when you put this system into place to identify the stakeholders in your business, and how it will line up with your showroom process. This leads us to the last point…

10. Adapting your showroom process
Last but certainly not least, it’s wise to think about your online buying process in relation to your showroom process. Will they be radically separate, autonomous entities? What are the pros and cons of keeping them separate? Conversely, it might make more sense to take your online buying process and make it your showroom process. That’s a big change, and with change comes challenge and friction. So you want to make sure that your decisions with these two processes are going to match up or are well-aligned with one another. If they are going to be different, make sure you think about how they will be different, and what expectations you have for each type of customer and sales transaction.

This concludes our ten-point checklist! While we certainly hope these blog posts have helped your business, we understand you may have some questions about the kinds of questions you should ask yourself. If so, don’t be shy—please contact us through the link below. And don’t forget to join us next week for some bonus content about how to integrate your sales process.

Read previous posts in the Integrating Digital Retailing series:

Part 1: Selling, Lead Generation, and Trades – Laying the Groundwork

Part 2: Get a handle on deposits and lead duplication

Part 3: Take care of existing customers and the legal red ink

Part 4: Deliver the goods and protect yourself from fraud