India’s largest carmaker Maruti Suzuki India announced that the company has sold over two lakh cars via its online channel. The company said that it has been two years since it introduced a new digital channel and now they have about 1,000 dealerships across the country.
“Our investment to create a hyper-local platform is to help customers discover faster and connect to their nearest dealers. This initiative has seen rapid growth in recent times. In the last two years, we have integrated over 1,000 dealerships across 3,000 online touchpoints in this digital transformation journey,” Maruti Suzuki India Executive Director (Marketing & Sales) Shashank Srivastava said in a statement.
“Since the introduction of this new digital channel in 2018, we have witnessed a three times increase in digital inquiries and recorded sales of over 2 lakh units since April 2019. This digital channel has helped to generate over 21 lakh customer inquiries,” Srivastava added.
Srivatsava cited a report by Google that says around 95 percent of new car sales in India are somehow influenced by digital channels. The report says that the customer first researches online about the car then they take a decision and visit the physical dealership. While online experience provides the complete spectrum of information to the customers, at the last mile the customers seek assurance of the deal from their trusted dealer advisors.
“Interestingly, customers who enquire through our digital channel end up purchasing a car within 10 days. This reaffirms that with a robust online to offline platform executed by a digitally enabled salesforce, converting digital inquiries into sales becomes easier,” Srivastava said.
The company is reporting higher traffic flow for its digital dealerships and it can be seen as the positive result of COVID-19. The company has reported a five-fold increase to around 20 percent of total sales. While the digital inquiry contribution has further increased exceeding 33 percent during the last five months.
