Mercedes-Benz
The Mercedes-Benz Digital Dealership program is currently transforming the Mercedes-Benz in-dealership experience with immersive tools & interactive touchpoints to enable a seamless customer journey between the online and in-dealership environment. The program is currently being activated across the fleet of Mercedes-Benz dealerships in North America and Canada – approximately 350 locations in total. I'm currently leading the effort to help strategize, design and develop the immersive experiences, along with enabling the support program to maintain the experience in the field.
Our research indicated a customer disconnect between the pre-dealership visit research phase of the customer journey and the in-dealership experience itself. Customers are increasingly requiring less in-dealership visits to reach a buying decision and, in many cases, the buying decision is reached before entering the dealership environment. In addition, there were transparency & trust issues that needed to be overcome as customers engaged with dealers during the in-dealership purchase process. Finally, the experience itself felt outdated and wasn’t leveraging technology and interactive experiences to help drive the sales process.
We enabled tools & experiences to allow for a seamless continuation of the online experience, allowing customers to retrieve favorited vehicles and build-your-own car configurations in-dealership. In addition, we deliver a consistent experience from a brand, content & messaging platform across all channels, unifying backend platforms and reducing demands on content creation & maintenance. Finally, the experiences themselves are premium, immersive and flexible, activated across a configurable and modular set of display options, sizes, and form-factors, enabling a kit-of-parts solution that can be mixed-and-matched based on the needs of the individual dealerships.
This solution included free-floating tablets for dealers, enabling side-by-side communication and connection between customers and associates. In addition, we enabled “wheel-stand” fixture-mounted tablets that delivers key selling points of a specific vehicle with additional tools for color and wheel selection. Dealers configuring this experience is as easy as scanning the VIN number of the vehicle activating a download of the vehicle-specific content automatically, allowing dealers to reconfigure their showroom floor quickly and easily. Finally, we activated a large-screen 4K multi-touch experience across 46” and 86” form-factors, delivering an immersive and engaging sales platform. This experience features brand content, educational videos, and a deep build-your-own car configuration experience delivered on a large-format 4K interactive screen. Proximity sensors and experience-level analytics integration deliver insightful data around attraction & engagement metrics, allowing for optimization of the platform over time.
The platform was recently extended to pop-up store locations, brand events and major auto-show activations across North America, extending the platform to physical environments beyond the dealership.
