Improving customers’ car-buying experience is “the biggest opportunity in automotive retail” today, says industry veteran Chip Perry.
And to do that, dealerships need to transform the sales process by eliminating the bottlenecks that lead to long waits at the showroom and frustrated customers, he said.
Perry — who previously led both Autotrader and TrueCar — is now CEO of A2Z Sync, which helps dealerships transition to one-person selling.
That model, also known as single point of contact, is an effort to make the sales process more efficient.
In the model, a customer works with only one dealership employee throughout the transaction, rather than shuffling among multiple employees on the sales floor and in the finance and insurance office.
Natalia Giner, who was CEO of A2Z Sync prior to Perry’s arrival, will stay with the company as its head of product, Perry told Automotive News.
Perry, 66, said he will work to grow A2Z Sync, a company founded by Colorado dealer Aaron Wallace initially to help his seven-store Schomp Automotive Group move away from a full-time F&I office.
A2Z Sync offers dealerships a customer-facing digital menu so the sales employee and the customer can walk through options together. The company also provides training and support to help retailers reorganize their sales teams and processes around the single-person concept.
“I wanted to do something that would address the biggest opportunity in this industry,” Perry said last week. “I felt that A2Z is in a great position to have a positive impact over the next few years.”
While digital retailing is increasing, in-person transactions at a dealership are going to remain a significant part of the sales process for years, he predicted.
Improving that experience to make it faster and remove friction is a key way to improve customer satisfaction with buying a vehicle, he said.
Including Schomp’s stores, 25 dealerships use A2Z Sync’s platform. Perry said he would like to have several hundred dealers using the system over the next several years.
Perry expects the company’s 25-person work force to double by the end of the year, with an emphasis on adding to the training and support team to help dealerships reorganize their job descriptions, pay plans and processes around a single-point-of-contact model.
“It’s the fundamental transformation of the retail process to enable one person to sell the car to create a delightful experience for the customer,” Perry said.
Wallace said that Perry brings experience with software and technology that will allow A2Z Sync to achieve greater scale.
“He brings a lot of credibility,” Wallace said. “He brings a lot of connections, a lot of know-how, much more experience.”