Why couldn’t I foresee that I was losing my best customers? When someone asks that question, it is usually too late.

The most efficient and preventive way to detect changes in customer habits is to assess what customers are buying today.

A few years ago it was conceivable that a customer would leave “from one day to the next”, but with the technologies available today this should not happen anymore: we have to know how to predict the behavior of customers using the information we have.

In this article we will analyze different ways of using Business Intelligence to detect changes in habits and trends, and create predictions that will be the trigger for effective strategies in the Parts Department.

Let’s Analyze Customer Parts Purchasing

The parts analyst for the Ultra Auto dealership has detected that between 2018 and 2019 parts sales increased 8%, from $4,6 million to $5.1 million.

Not satisfied with that result, the parts analyst uses BI to further analyze the composition of those figures.

First alert! While there was an improvement, the dealership’s top five customers in 2018 bought less in 2019.

Second alert! When the parts analyst added one more year to the analysis, it became clear that the trend was repeating itself.

By using Business Intelligence, the parts analyst can dive into the numbers and discover issues that can be questioned and improved. In this case, the two alerts force the analyst to look for the causes that explain the decrease:

• Are customers buying parts from another dealership?
• What parts were they buying in greater quantity and have now stopped buying?
• Did customers change vehicles and now require fewer replacement parts? Did they buy their new vehicles from us?

Reaching these conclusions without BI requires a lot of time: choosing and comparing reports, applying calculations, etc. This time can be better spent analyzing results and looking for ways to improve processes.

Autologica BI lets you automatically measure all the key KPIs of the dealership.