Introduction
For many buyers, the journey to owning a car is still filled with friction and unnecessary complexity. From online research to showroom visits and post-sale service, the experience often falls short of expectations, despite the industry’s digital advancements.
According to Salesforce, 99% of buyers are dissatisfied with the current car-buying experience. This single statistic exposes a wide gap between what customers expect and what dealerships deliver. Today’s buyers research online, compare options across platforms, and walk into showrooms expecting personalized, informed interactions. When those expectations aren’t met, the automotive customer journey is hindered, and competitors win.
As buyer expectations rise and journeys become more digital and non-linear, sales-led models are no longer enough. OEMs and dealers must change their customer engagement strategies to make them more personalized and AI-driven. In this blog, we explore key strategies to achieve it and how Salesforce features help in enhancing CX.
The Shift from Transactional Selling to Experience-Led Dealerships
Auto dealerships are no longer judged based on price, inventory, or negotiation skills. Modern buyers expect a seamless, transparent, and personalized experience across every interaction, before, during, and after the sale. This has pushed dealerships to shift from a transactional sales model toward an experience-led approach that focuses on long-term relationships and lifetime value.
The automotive customer journey now begins long before a showroom visit and continues well after the sale. Buyers research online, compare options, and schedule test drives digitally. Buyers want continuity: they expect dealerships to recognize them, understand their preferences, and pick up conversations exactly where they left off, whether online or in the showroom.
Key Challenges Dealers Face in This Shift
Fragmented Communication Channels
Dealers engage customers across websites, emails, calls, chat, social media, and in-store conversations, but these channels are not connected. This leads to disjointed interactions, and customers need to repeat issues multiple times. Sales teams lack context from previous touchpoints, resulting in inconsistent messaging. Over the period, this fragmentation erodes trust and lowers the buyer’s experience.
Slow Response Times
Modern buyers expect fast responses, especially during online research and lead inquiries. Manual lead routing and disconnected systems delay follow-ups, causing missed opportunities. Even small delays can push buyers toward competitors. Slow response times directly impact test drive bookings, conversions, and customer satisfaction.
Limited Visibility into Buyer Intent
Dealers often lack insight into where buyers are on their journey or what actions they’ve taken online. Without visibility into browsing behavior, vehicle preferences, or engagement history, personalization cannot be achieved. This results in generic outreach that fails to resonate. Poor intent visibility reduces close rates and buyer satisfaction.
Manual Sales-Centric Processes
Many dealerships still rely on manual data entry and sales-focused workflows. These processes prioritize closing deals over understanding customer needs. As a result, teams spend more time on administration than engagement. This limits scalability and hinders the consistent delivery of services.
Post-Sale Experience Gaps
Customer engagement often drops immediately after the vehicle is sold. Service reminders, maintenance updates, and follow-ups are generic. This breaks the customer relationship at a critical moment. Poor post-sale experiences reduce loyalty, service revenue, and repeat purchases.
To succeed, dealerships must redesign their operating model to improve their customer experience strategy. This means connecting data, aligning teams, and enabling personalized, real-time engagement at every stage of the journey.
Key Strategies for OEMs and Dealers to Improve Buyer Experience
As the automotive customer journey becomes increasingly digital, non-linear, and experience-driven, OEMs and dealers should align digital and in-store journeys using the right technology foundation. The following strategies outline how automotive organizations can deliver connected, customer-centric experiences, enabled by Salesforce.
Create a Unified Customer View
Buyers interact with automotive brands across multiple touchpoints, including OEM websites, dealer sites, mobile apps, social channels, call centers, showrooms, and service centers. When this data lives in silos, dealers lose critical context and are forced to rely on generic engagement. Connecting customer data enables a unified view of each buyer, including preferences, engagement history, vehicle interest, and ownership data.
Salesforce Automotive Cloud and Data Cloud enable this unified view by bringing together marketing, sales, service, and ownership data. Duplicate records are automatically flagged, documents are validated in real time, and data quality checks run continuously. This connected data platform helps teams personalize interactions, anticipate needs, and avoid repetitive conversations. This even supports advanced analytics and AI-driven recommendations across the journey.
Bridge Online and In-Store Conversations
Most car buyers complete a significant portion of their journey online before stepping into a dealership. So, they expect showroom interactions to reflect their digital behavior, vehicles viewed, features compared, and financing options explored. By capturing real-time digital signals and making them instantly available to sales teams, dealers can continue conversations seamlessly from screen to showroom. Salesforce enables this continuity by syncing online engagement data with CRM records, empowering sales advisors to deliver informed, relevant interactions that shorten sales cycles. Marketing Cloud and Data Cloud work together to orchestrate personalized outreach across channels and improve buyer journeys.
Enable Real-Time Inventory Transparency
Lack of real-time inventory visibility remains a major challenge in dealerships. Customers expect accurate information on availability, pricing, and delivery timelines, regardless of location. Modern workflows require more than traditional DMS (Dealership management system). By connecting inventory data across branches and making it accessible in real time, dealers can quickly match buyers with the right vehicles, reduce lost sales, and improve fulfillment efficiency. Salesforce Automotive Cloud brings these insights directly into sales workflows, enabling teams to respond faster, recommend alternatives confidently, and deliver a smoother, more reliable buying experience.
Elevate the Ownership Experience
The buyer’s journey doesn’t end at sales, as service interactions heavily influence loyalty, repeat purchases, and brand perception. Poor service experiences result in churning, while personalized service builds long-term relationships. By connecting service data with sales and customer profiles, dealers can deliver proactive reminders, faster issue resolution, and effective support experiences. Salesforce Service Cloud enables this by giving service teams full visibility into customer and vehicle history. This helps to deliver omnichannel support and consistent post-sale experiences.
Continuously Gather Buyers’ Feedback
Understanding how customers experience their vehicles is critical for both OEMs and dealers. Capturing insights across service visits, digital surveys, and ownership touchpoints allows for improving products, services, and engagement strategies.
When feedback is connected to customer and vehicle data, organizations can take targeted action by addressing issues early and strengthening trust. Salesforce Experience Cloud and integrated survey capabilities make it easier to gather, analyze, and operationalize customer feedback.
Agentic AI in Automotive Customer Journey Transformation
As automotive customer journeys become more complex with high expectations, traditional automation and rule-based systems are no longer sufficient. Auto dealers need intelligent systems that can understand context, make decisions, and help their teams. This is where Agentic AI can be more effective and advantageous. Agentic AI is capable of observing customer signals, reasoning over data, deciding next-best actions, and executing tasks across systems.
For example, an agent can detect when a buyer revisits a vehicle page, check real-time inventory availability, trigger a personalized follow-up, schedule a test drive, and notify the sales advisor.
Agentic AI transforms dealer and OEM operations by automating high-impact workflows across the lifecycle:
- Automatically qualify leads based on behavior, intent, and availability, and route them to the right advisor.
- Trigger context-aware messages across email, SMS, or chat based on buyer actions.
- Recommend vehicles, financing options, or promotions.
- Predict service needs, schedule appointments, and send reminders.
- Monitor ownership signals and trigger loyalty or upsell journeys.
How Salesforce Agentforce Enables Agentic AI for Automotive CX?
Salesforce Agentforce brings agentic AI into the automotive ecosystem by enabling organizations to build and deploy AI agents that operate directly across Salesforce applications. These agents use trusted customer data from Salesforce Data Cloud and act within defined governance and business rules. For example, an AI agent monitors customer activity after a test drive. If interest signals increase, it prompts a personalized follow-up, checks inventory availability, suggests financing options, and schedules the next interaction. If delays or issues arise, it escalates them to the right team, helping dealerships close deals. With Agentforce, automotive teams can:
- Deploy AI agents that understand customer context across sales, marketing, and service.
- Provide 24/7 personalized and connected customer service through various channels.
- Enable natural-language interactions, allowing teams to query data, generate insights, or trigger workflows conversationally.
- Maintain security, transparency, and control through Salesforce’s enterprise-grade governance framework.
Conclusion
The automotive customer journey has fundamentally shifted, from a linear, sales-driven process to an experience-led system. Buyers now expect dealerships to know their needs, respond in real time, and deliver a consistent experience. Solving major auto-dealer challenges requires a unified data foundation and intelligent engagement across the entire journey. Salesforce Automotive Cloud, Data Cloud, and Agentforce provide the foundation to connect teams, personalize every touchpoint, and improve customer experience.
Kasmo helps automotive businesses with deep expertise in the Salesforce implementation. From unifying customer and vehicle data to enabling Agentic AI-driven workflows across sales, marketing, and service, Kasmo ensures every solution is effective. Having proven frameworks, industry accelerators, and certified Salesforce experts, Kasmo enables faster deployment and enhances customer experience management strategy. This helps automotive leaders build truly connected and experienced dealerships.
