Industry experts demystify big data and explain how to make it work for you

The topic of big data is one most nontechnical people will go well out of their way to avoid. At best, it promises to be hard to comprehend; at worst, for minds not keyed into the mysteries of analytics and algorithms, it threatens to induce full-brain paralysis.

This is probably true for most automotive dealers. They want to enjoy the marketing insights, sales benefits, and customer-retention gains big data and analytics can bring to their dealership, but don’t want to have to know the ins and outs of—or try to explain—how their system actually works.

Fortunately, with the latest offerings from tech-savvy automotive vendors, it’s become much more intuitive to integrate big data into dealership systems and, most importantly, start using them without needing a PhD.

You can let your vendor partner worry about details like stochastic gradient descent and logistic regression algorithms, and get on with using the system to make operating decisions that will help sell more vehicles and gain customers for life.

So if your dealership hasn’t yet taken advantage of the power of big data or isn’t harnessing it to your satisfaction, what’s your next step? To find out, we consulted three experts on the topic, industry leaders who understand both the “whys” and “hows” of big data: Kendall Billman, senior vice president at AutoAlert; Steve Cottrell, CEO and president of Authenticom; and Ken Kolodziej, CEO of String Automotive.

Their insightful responses to our questions demystify the reasons for and application of big data, and explain why now, more than ever, dealerships need to be taking advantage of its analytical power to stay one step ahead of their customers. Maintaining a competitive edge in an ever-tightening marketplace demands it.

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Dealer Marketing Magazine