Winnow Technologies (Winnow)
Connecting Auto Dealerships to Customers

As COVID-19 accelerated digital transformation across the business landscape, customers started researching, reviewing, and purchasing products online instead of going to brick-and-mortar stores. However, transitioning retail operations in line with changing customer preferences is difficult for businesses with a deeply-rooted, in-person sales approach.

Auto dealerships perfectly illustrate this challenge, preferring in person customer interactions over virtual engagement. This hesitation toward implementing customer-facing technologies is driven by a fear of disrupting their day-to-day operations. Recent shortages in automobile stock are causing price hikes, adversely impacting customer buying decisions and hindering dealerships from utilizing digital solutions for client engagement. Catering to such complex challenges is WinnowPro, a digital marketing solution provider that offers advanced technological innovations for ad campaign management.

Winnow Technologies was established to develop solutions that enhance conventional marketing methodologies while solving the problems emerging from rapid digitalization. It quickly identified the massive consumer demand for a digital auto shopping experience across the U.S., which most dealers were not prepared to offer. To help these firms, Winnow combined the expertise of digital marketing strategists and data scientists with machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies.

“Today, our digital marketing methodologies mimic the real behavior of dealerships and their sales force, enabling clients to lock down potential sales with impactful engagement and create a better customer experience,” says David Saedi, CEO of Winnow Technologies.

Winnow’s portfolio includes targeted solutions such as the intelligent WinnowChat, a chatbot that allows shoppers to access the inventory details of dealership systems, boosting the overall transparency of an engagement. Similarly, its competitive intelligence tool (CIT) offers increased website visibility and traffic through digital marketing. CIT is an intelligence tool that assesses an auto dealership’s competitors, online advertising methodologies, and marketing success rate. CIT also provides a report comprising competitors’ dealership statistics such as vehicle sales, sales management and tactics, online footprint, and specific vehicle searches on Google. This consolidation of critical market statistics enables clients to conceptualize highly-engaging digital marketing strategies and minimize the need for constant reprioritization of resources in tandem with evolving customer behavior. Above all, CIT’s market competition report helps auto dealerships increase their online visibility and better understand their prospective customers.

WinnowChat is a next-generation customer interaction platform custom built for auto dealerships to provide a channel for lead capture and service appointment scheduling across multiple platforms. WinnowChat reduces the chances of a lost customer by increasing engagement using an AI-enabled natural language-based chatbot. These interactions are enabled by integrations with prominent dealership systems to replicate the behavior of a skilled dealership employee. This eliminates the inherent issues of a managed chat service that fails to deliver quality and consistency.

With respect to client onboarding, Winnow Technologies has an automated process that makes customer engagement simple yet effective. In most cases, when a dealership is leveraging a marketing platform, it’s extremely cumbersome and time-consuming for sales personnel to manage customer queries effectively. Auto dealerships also have the inherent challenge of fragmented information that hinders sales personnel from accessing the data required to accurately describe a vehicle’s specifications and boost sales performance. As an antidote, Winnow offers an automated platform wherein a sales representative can sign up and have classified access to vital products or services. The company has also integrated suitable application programming interfaces into the platform and offers reporting capabilities that give a 360-degree perspective of a dealership’s offerings.

Our digital marketing methodologies mimic the real behavior of dealerships and their sales force, enabling clients to lock down potential sales with impactful engagement and create a better customer experience

Winnow’s benefits are reflected in a recent example where a small dealer in central California was looking to improve their competitive position against a large dealer in the same region. While the competition’s sales numbers were available, the dealership also wanted to track its online activity to gain the upper hand. The CIT platform accomplished this by capturing, comparing, and benchmarking the local online activity that generates website traffic. The report combined a myriad of data sources, helping the dealership benchmark their statistics against the identified competition and provided recommendations for improving their marketing strategy. The findings supported the dealership in enhancing their overall marketing and sales performance by over 20 percent.

Powered by its unparalleled digital marketing platform, WinnowPro aims to be a one-stop shop for all customer interactions at a dealership, enabling them to meet the changing needs of the target audiences across all channels. As the virtualization of marketing and sales continues, WinnowPro’s market leading products and services are poised to empower auto dealerships to capitalize on the imminent opportunities.