Car maker Skoda is using mobile devices to capture customer information quickly and use it to boost sales as part of its first real-time test drive campaign.
Skoda is holding a series of ‘ride and drive’ events during the year to raise awareness of its range and increase the number of customer test drives.
Skoda is using a PDA-based application to capture data about potential buyers and upload it to its customer management agency in real time. Its speed and accuracy ensures everyone who test drove a car receives a follow-up within five days.
The company's communications manager Annette Spencer said: ‘With data collection, it is all about speed and accuracy. We need to get data to our retailers as quickly as possible and relying on paper meant that in the past, it could take days or even weeks.
‘It is up to us to impress customers with how quickly we can send them follow up information.’
The result was an increase in sales by 18.5 per cent compared to last year, with a 31.7 per cent increase in sales of its Octavia model.
Spencer added: ‘The ride and drive events are crucial and give us an opportunity to demonstrate the quality of our cars. As a marketing team, we must also take the time to learn about our customers.’
Data captured includes basic demographics and key buying indicators such as the type of car the customers currently drives, expectations and timeframe for buying a car. It also verifies personal data with national databases.
TAAP provides its OnTAAP DataCapture product, a mobile electronic data capture device that uses GPRS or Wi-Fi to share and upload information instantaneously to back-end systems and databases.
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