Crafting Customer Convenience in the Modern Auto Industry

Discover what drives customer satisfaction in the automotive aftermarket industry as we welcome Chris Sutton, Vice President of Global Automotive Retail at JD Power, to Auto Care ON AIR. Unpack the intriguing revelations from the JD Power's Automotive Service Index (ASI) Study, and learn how personal interactions and seamless experiences are valued over mere pricing in today's market. With five years of data, Chris reveals how technology has paved the way for enhanced convenience through innovations like online scheduling and video-based inspections. The episode offers a thoughtful examination of how these technological advancements have shaped and redefined customer expectations since the pre-pandemic era.

Explore how the rise of mobile auto services is reshaping the industry landscape, especially among younger customers who favor convenience. As remote work and declining interest in vehicle ownership become more prevalent, businesses are prompted to rethink strategies that prioritize customer convenience and relationship building. We delve into the evolving methodologies of customer feedback collection, supported by AI and advanced analytics. Chris shares insights into the power of integrating voice of customer data with operational information, providing an edge in strategic decision-making. This episode is packed with valuable insights and trends, spotlighting the automotive sector's journey towards a more customer-centric future.

To learn more about the Auto Care Association visit autocare.org.

To learn more about our show and suggest future topics and guests, visit autocare.org/podcast

Chapters

• 0:08 Automotive Industry Trends and Insights
• 12:23 Customer Preferences in Mobile Auto Service
• 28:35 Emerging Trends in Auto Service

Transcript

Mike Chung: 0:08

Welcome to Auto Care ON AIR, a candid podcast for a curious industry. I'm Mike Chung, Senior Director of Market Intelligence at the Auto Care Association, and this is Indicators, where we identify and explore data that will help you monitor and forecast industry performance. This includes global economic data, industry indicators and new data that will help you monitor and forecast industry performance. This includes global economic data, industry indicators and new data sources. I want to welcome everybody to another edition of Indicators and I'm really pleased to introduce Chris Sutton. Chris is Vice President of Global Automotive Retail at JD Power. So, Chris, welcome to the show.

Chris Sutton: 0:51

Thanks, Mike, appreciate you having me today.

Mike Chung: 0:54

And for the benefit of our audience, can you just tell us a little bit about yourself, your company, your role there?

Chris Sutton: 1:01

Sure, I've been with JD Power almost 20 years now, so always on the automotive side. My background is more on the automotive side versus, let's say, a research side, so my experience is in sales, marketing, distribution with JD Power. A lot of our work is not only in benchmarking certain industries, but we also have a customer success component of our teams that helps clients use the data, helps them use the insights to help improve the experience and their business outcomes too.

Mike Chung: 1:39

Really helpful and I think, just thinking about your customers, particularly in the automotive space, I think of the initial quality awards I see those advertised. Can you tell us a little bit more about where we might see JD Power and perhaps a little bit about your clientele?

Chris Sutton: 1:58

is. You know, not exclusively, but most of our client base is on the automotive side, whether it is the manufacturers, suppliers. We've had the automotive aftermarket service study right. So that is a study that addresses aftermarket benchmarking and that's a newer area for us. We've been in that part of the industry for five years and again, I think historically what we've done and kind of regardless of how we've approached the industry is historically we've benchmarked that industry. Then clients will typically have questions around wanting deeper insights. So we might do proprietary engagements unique to that client and then we might provide advisory services around customer experience. So we really kind of start with the benchmarking and the benchmarking is really kind of the core of most of what we do.

Mike Chung: 2:57

Well, that's great Thanks for sharing that, and I remember you and I were talking about when we met in earlier this year in the spring and I think it was Chicago and you shared some insights at our conference regarding the Automotive Service Index study. Can you tell me a little bit about whether that study or other studies that perhaps have come up recently, and perhaps a little bit about what you've been learning?

Chris Sutton: 3:21

Yeah. So let's talk about the Aftermarket Service Index Study, or ASI, that we've conducted really around five years now in the industry and I think a lot of our auto retail studies. They really follow the same. I guess core tenets of we're measuring some combination of how customers feel about the people they interact with, the facility or environment that they're in, an element of convenience, right, the quality of the work that's done and then the perceived value.

Chris Sutton: 3:58

And I think for us the biggest surprises I think to me being fairly new to the aftermarket side is that when we came into the industry and we started benchmarking, you know honestly if when we first did the study, if the only thing that mattered to customers was value and convenience and none of the other stuff mattered, you know honestly, for us sometimes it's not a very interesting study if the only thing that matters is price. So for us I thought it was gratifying and interesting that, at least from a customer perspective, that there was a fairly good balance across those broader areas. So to us I thought it was interesting and encouraging that customers really had very positive feedback to the people that they interacted with and of course value and convenience were absolutely important, but kind of the element of people to me was certainly encouraging, and I thought it was good for the industry too that those behaviors were valued and rewarded.

Mike Chung: 5:03

Right, and I'm cheating a little bit by looking at some of the results, admittedly, but, as you alluded to, it's not just the bottom line. It's the experience that you're getting good advice, that it's fair that you're able to speak with an expert as well, and so I think you had it as personnel. And then also the convenience in terms of whether it's scheduling or proximity of the facility, for example. Those seem to be pretty foremost in the consumer's mind.

Chris Sutton: 5:36

it seemed like yeah, and I think for us too. One of the other interesting aspects, I guess, is really where the impact of technology lays, right. Does it help inform and better the customer perception of people, right, is it an enabler for people to connect with customers, and to what degree things like, let's say, the use of video-based inspections can reinforce this perception of quality and trust? And you mentioned online scheduling to what degree that really helps reinforce convenience.

Chris Sutton: 6:15

So a lot of the industries that we participate in, for the industries themselves, they're always asking us look, what role is technology playing, what are the trends you're seeing around that? So for us, you know that role of technology is important. And just a comment about the studies we do you know there's an element here of ranking and the brands that you know that do well have the ability to license that award and promote that, and that's an element of it. But to us, another part of it is, you know, really providing that voice of customer feedback and also identifying trends that over time again, we've only been in the aftermarket industry for about five years, but over time that we really can start identifying and then trending those items over time.

Mike Chung: 7:04

And I think it's interesting too, and perhaps fortuitous, because you mentioned five years, 2019, pre-pandemic, so you have that sort of baseline before the world changed quite a bit. And when you talk about technology, I'm thinking about it from two perspectives One for the consumer, the scheduling perhaps there, and then two from the automobile itself, whether it's sensors, new technology and the fact that it is not as simple as oh, and the fact that it is not as simple as oh, price rules, it's only price. I think that can lend to a lot of interesting implications for your clients, for the manufacturers, for the service providers as well. Is that fair to say?

Chris Sutton: 7:48

Absolutely yeah, I would say. Along with that is, of course, the pace of electrification in the industry has definitely been of interest, you know, particularly as it. You know as either it slows down and the rate of adoption for things like plug-in hybrids takes more precedence than maybe we thought it would one or two years ago, one or two years ago. But I think to the industry it's not only, it's the, again, the combination of you know, the frequency of these things that are happening, the degree, that of customer experience, but also what's the impact on the customer. What does the customer value? What type of things, honestly, does this customer really not care about that much? And what type of things, honestly, does this customer really not care about that much? And you know, I think, when we think about, you know, how these industry changes and industries are changing, for us, a lot of it is, you know, really monitoring what's important to the customer, particularly across these demographic groups, Because you know we're certainly seeing that customers value different things in different ways. It certainly keeps it fresh and interesting.

Mike Chung: 8:58

And I think I can just imagine a lot of interesting use cases for the data, because you mentioned EVs and whether it's battery, electric, a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle. You have the DIY DIFM sort of consideration and perhaps if I'm used to internal combustion engine vehicles and maybe I change my oil, maybe I do my own tire rotations and things like that, let's say I go to a BEV and am I comfortable doing a tire change myself, Are there going to be hurdles and perhaps that expertise that I might have at either an aftermarket provider, at a dealer. I can imagine where that type of data and sort of what are those things that are important, as you mentioned, as well as perhaps what are buzzword bingo, pain points and so forth too right.

Chris Sutton: 9:46

Yeah, it's interesting on the EV side, particularly on the service aspect of is.

Chris Sutton: 9:53

You know, I guess, a couple of things for us that were interesting were you know. I think there's the notion that an EV is going to require much less service over time than the traditional ICE vehicle will, which it should be the case, but due to the propensity for recalls, at least initially, due to the new technology, we haven't seen that to date. Currently those customers are coming in for service at about the same rate as an ICE vehicle customer. And then the other part is, I think there's the thought that the dealers are going to capture more of that EV business relative to the aftermarket and for some type of work. That's true, I think, the notion that for repair, that most of that work is going to go back to the dealer at least so far that's what we're seeing. But the idea that customers are going to purchase tires more frequently from the dealers in the aftermarket, we're just not seeing that at all, that the aftermarket propensity for those customers to purchase tires through the aftermarket is every bit as strong for EVs as it is for the ICE vehicles.

Mike Chung: 11:02

That's interesting to hear and I would imagine, since BEVs are still relatively new in the market, there tends to be. It seems like there's a tendency to lease because of all the software and technological upgrades and a lot of these vehicles are going to be under warranty, I would presume so for a lot of the things. I can see where they might go back to the dealer, just sort of more naturally. And one thing you alluded to was the demographics, because I remember in Chicago you mentioned the age sort of splits in terms of, how, say, gen Z and millennials, how there might be room to grow there for all service providers and sort of the benchmarking kind of looks different when you look at generation by generation. Am I remembering that correctly, chris?

Chris Sutton: 11:50

Yeah, that's an interesting point, Mike. A lot of times I think you know most of our studies they do focus on the new vehicle buyer, right, and a lot of times we have to remind ourselves that. You know, the average age of a new vehicle buyer is about 50 years old. You know, give or take a year. So you know, by definition it's a little bit of an older customer, particularly as the price of the vehicles increases, but there's always a lot of interest in well, what does the younger customer want? What does Gen Z expect?

Chris Sutton: 12:23

And one of the areas that's been getting a lot of attention is this issue of mobile service, where I'm either conducting service at the customer's home or place of business. And to what degree do customers want that right? It makes sense that a commercial customer, that they need to keep their vehicles out on the road, that they're going to have interest there. But what about the retail customer? And what we found is, again, there's a lot of areas we measure where sometimes there isn't that much difference between demographic groups. But in this particular area the younger customer is dramatically more predisposed to have interest in mobile service than, let's say, the boomer and pre-boomer customer. Dramatic difference two and three times more, whereas that's something that an older customer really isn't that interested in or is a younger customer. So that was one area of pretty stark differences in preferences among those customer groups.

Mike Chung: 13:18

I appreciate you sharing that because I'm trying to put myself in the mindset of, say, a client who may be an OE and they're thinking about their service provision and as trends change whether it's working more from home or less likelihood to purchase a vehicle how might we think long-term about the service delivery model if you?

Chris Sutton: 13:41

will. It is, yeah, and we've certainly got questions from some of the aftermarket providers too in terms of what our customer is telling us, and so we've been able to kind of share some of that same information with them. What are customers telling us? And so we've been able to kind of share some of that same information with them. You know, we're definitely seeing that kind of, regardless of which part of the industry it's. You know, how can I keep customers, enhance the relationship with, whether it's value or convenience and again, convenience may be value for some customers. So, this element of really trying to understand how can I competitively differentiate myself through convenience there's a lot of interest there. So again, it's exciting for us. It's a great part of the industry to be measuring as it's changing right now, that's really fascinating.

Mike Chung: 14:26

Thanks for telling me about that study, and our listeners as well, clearly.

Jonathan Larsen: 14:30

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Mike Chung: 15:01

Are there other studies that are kind of recent or sort of you're collecting data for, that are anything sparking an interest there that might be worth highlighting?

Chris Sutton: 15:11

Yeah, I think one of the things we've, one of the frustrations that we've heard from it doesn't matter what industry it is is that Logitech Power will we'll conduct research, we'll review the results and then, let's say, parts of the industry will take action on those results, but it'll be a full year before we do the next study right, so it's like typically we'll do an annual study. So what we started in the last year or so is, for some of the core studies, we've started ongoing measurement of those studies. So our dealer customer service index, which is it's almost like the companion study to the aftermarket service study, it measures the dealer experience. But that study we've just started in the last three months, measuring on a monthly basis. So subscribers get access to monthly feedback, usually about, I think, the first month. We had 10,000 responses of how customers felt about that service experience and so we're now reporting out on a monthly basis. So that's the first thing is like not just conducting the research once a year, it's like kind of an always on idea.

Chris Sutton: 16:20

And then the second is using operational data in conjunction with voice of customer data. So what's that mean? In this case, through the CSI study, we have access to repair level data. Again we're keeping both the retailer and the customer information anonymized but we're incorporating that behavioral data. And in this case, where we have tens of millions of records right versus the voice of customer feedback, where if I have 10,000 responses, that level of detail is great if I'm giving feedback on, let's say, voice of customer and customer perception of different items, but if I'm trying to look at an individual vehicle and model and seeing, let's say, repeat repair issues, I need a lot of responses to be able to really make some insights on that level of data. So that's where you know. Back to your original question, anything right now where we're able to take our core voice of customer data and enhance that with operational data, we feel really is a strong combination. And again we're looking for ways where we can kind of credibly do that in ways that enhance our studies and benchmarks.

Mike Chung: 17:34

Oh, that's really interesting to hear. So when you talk about the monthly kind of input of data, I can see from a consumption standpoint it could be a dashboard where you can kind of zoom in on different kind of timeframes and just have a little bit more flexibility and kind of, like you said, not necessarily have to wait until the next year if you will Right, it's really interesting.

Chris Sutton: 17:56

Again, we've only been doing this particular study, for I guess we're coming up on our third month and you know we had some assumptions about how the industry and our clients were going to digest this data right. And you know, to that end our assumption was okay, we're going to have to kind of train them on how to use this dashboard. It's a new reporting site for us. But then I think you know, to your question, our thought is that, look, going forward, by the time we get to the fifth and sixth months and everybody's oriented to that particular reporting platform, then at that point it'll be more. How do our? Maybe on a monthly basis we pull out specific industry insights in one area and then the next month you do something completely different. But we're trying to figure that out as we go. I think we've got some hypothesis and guesses about what's going to be interesting.

Mike Chung: 18:50

But you know, to that end, it's fairly new for us, so we're trying to figure it out. Oh, absolutely. I mean the fact that it's so new and it'll be early to tell seasonality, for instance right.

Mike Chung: 18:55

Because some of the things I was going to ask you about is just kind of like collection of data for, say, a consumer study. Right, because when we look back historically, it may have been something you get in the mail and then it was random landline digit dialing, right. So just thinking about how data collection has changed over the years, it's really encouraging to hear sort of that innovation of okay, let's get operational data, this is going to come in at a regular cadence, right.

Chris Sutton: 19:25

It is and I think to your point, what led us to that path was a little bit what you mentioned, whereas you know there's certainly risk in this traditional means of collecting customer feedback. You know, one of the benefits we've always had in our traditional automotive research studies is that we get access to the customer registration data so we know it's a verified owner, we're able to survey that customer off the registration data. But you know a lot of customers they don't have the patience for a 40-minute survey, which is what we will typically ask them. So we've really explored different ways of conducting research. You know, fortunately our response rates on the research side have really kind of stabilized a bit after COVID.

Chris Sutton: 20:15

You know there was certainly risk on that pre-COVID, covid and post they've kind of leveled out a little bit. Maybe it's because customers are working from home, what have you. But that's absolutely a concern for us in terms of constantly monitoring. How do we connect with customers? How do we maintain and provide a representative group of customers, knowing that maybe younger customers are going to be less likely to respond to a longer survey? We have to look at different modular surveys or shorter type of surveys. So it's a real challenge. Fortunately we've got a great research team and science team that are, you know, kind of always monitoring that.

Mike Chung: 20:54

There's so much in there and I'll touch on a few things. I mean 40 minutes really, is that? A typical survey length for your group.

Chris Sutton: 21:01

Yeah, I mean, and what we've, you know, certainly we have, our research teams will let us know like, look, customers, they don't have the, they're not going to do that.

Mike Chung: 21:11

I need a big carrot to give to this person?

Chris Sutton: 21:13

Right, they do, you know. But then you separately have the industry. That has all these different business questions they want answered and you know that's not going to get answered in a five-question survey. So you know we're kind of constantly balancing a five question survey. So you know we're kind of constantly balancing and honestly we'll do, we might do multiple surveys on the same research platform to get to that. You know it's atypical for one topic to be that long, sure, but we're kind of constantly monitoring. Look, if we're not using a topic within the survey, it's crazy for us to be asking the consumer questions that then we're not either sharing with the industry or we find that they're really not using or interested in and we'll remove it. So we're kind of constantly evaluating that that makes sense.

Mike Chung: 21:57

And, like you said, the demographic, the representation, because there's the whole quote unquote science behind. Okay, let's make sure we have the right geographic distribution the right age profiling make domestic, foreign and new car, old car. So I'm sure there's a lot of, I guess, sample population considerations there and I guess you kind of answered it already, I think. But you mentioned from that 40-minute survey to okay, it could be modular, it could be across different instruments. Can we just dive into that a little bit more?

Chris Sutton: 22:42

Yeah, it is of. We know for the industry that there's a core group of feedback that we really do have to give a really robust set of responses. Usually in our studies we'll have, for as detailed as they are, a lot of times the index or score will only be based on, let's say, 15 to 20 rating questions and it's really all the diagnostic questions underneath that. So you asked about online scheduling or was the vehicle fixed right? So use of technology, all those diagnostics underneath it.

Chris Sutton: 23:20

So one of the things we've explored with is there a small group of customers that, let's say, you get access through a panel, that they're responding digitally and just by definition, you're not going to be able to ask them that same level of detail on the survey. And maybe for that group of customers, yeah, you ask them these 20 questions about the rating questions and then maybe the 10 most critical diagnostics underneath it and that's it for that group of customers. So you know, and then on the science side, they'll then weight that data accordingly. And again, fortunately, on the auto side, we've got really good data on market share across the different participants that enable us to kind of weight accordingly. But that's how we're working with it. But it doesn't mean that there's not a core group that still aren't completing the entire thing. It's just kind of balancing both of it.

Mike Chung: 24:12

That makes a lot of sense because you know, I think about the shortening attention span and just the different ways to take a survey, whether it's mobile, computer, telephone interview, et cetera. So it's encouraging to hear, and I mean it's a necessity for any market research provider, right.

Chris Sutton: 24:29

Yeah, it is, and you know I'm by no means the expert on, you know, user experience within these, but you know, within our company I'm assuming the industry is a lot of work on. If the customer is doing a survey on, let's say, their phone, that that user experience on the phone, whether it's the orientation of the screen and what the buttons look like, that just has to be a great user experience. Oh yeah, the customer is not going to do it.

Mike Chung: 24:58

Right, right, right. And one thing that is kind of neat to think about is because certainly I thought about those initial quality studies, long sort of kind of institutional studies, if you will that have been going on probably for decades, but some of the ones you mentioned just now are three months old, newer surveys, so that gives you certainly more flexibility.

Mike Chung: 25:22

Newer surveys so that gives you certainly more flexibility, and I think, back to those longer. It's been going on for a decade or more. There's a lot of consideration in terms of, well, how do we get to the same findings so we can report year over year.

Chris Sutton: 25:36

That's not an easy question to write a list. It is really. It's an important balance because you've got to be able to maintain the trendability to either report back to the industry or publicly in a credible way. At the same time, you've got to move your benchmarks forward. You know we can't be completely dependent on what we did 15, 20 years ago because it's just not going to work today. So it really is a balance we're always kind of striking. And in fact, that quality study you mentioned, that's another study that went on to this monthly cadence and there was a lot of thought put in about how do you retain this ability to trend that's gone over 30 years while bringing in new elements to it.

Mike Chung: 26:25

So, and I would imagine there's got to be some discussion with your clientele about what really matters the most here so that you can prioritize. Let's make sure we get feedback on these topics.

Chris Sutton: 26:35

Maybe these ones we can sort of leave as optional or jettison as needed, yeah, and I would say that's kind of a core of how we interact with most of the industries. You know you have to have a starting point from somewhere and I would say this has been true on the aftermarket side, especially after we had the study out there for a year. Is you know, as we review the results, then we ask each different member of the industry about look, what are the type of things you need to see from the study, what are the trends that you are seeing that's important to you? And then you know we can't incorporate all that stuff, but we do try and take as much as we can and that is for us that has been really gratifying about being as part of the aftermarket for the last five years is not only reporting out but also getting feedback in from different parts of the industry. It's about how you need to.

Chris Sutton: 27:33

You know this is more important than this and kind of the way you're segmenting, you need to take a different look at it. So the industry has been great in that regard. So the industry has been great in that regard and you know we try and have that fairly, I guess, circuitous. These are things that you know honestly, you know we may need to de-emphasize a bit, so you know it's like it's got to work that way. We can't just be, you know, up here kind of measuring.

Mike Chung: 28:16

There's a dynamic nature to that, yeah that's right and, I think, looking to the future, I'm thinking like five years out, 10 years out. You mentioned some of the things like voice of customer in combination with operational data. What are some of the other things, whether it's I know we've talked a little bit offline about large language models and other technologies and databases, if you will, or, I guess, really technologies what do you see in the future?

Chris Sutton: 28:48

Yeah, that's a great question because you know we've talked a lot about okay, we're going to ingest tens of millions of service records and we're going to incorporate all this voice of customer feedback. Incorporate all this voice of customer feedback. That stuff does not work without just a powerhouse analytics engine to be able to analyze the data. And you know, I would say, as a company, one of the areas I think where I think we could have certainly done better last handful years is around really kind of using the text and verbatim comments we get from our customers and incorporating that in. And so, I think, the use of again these large language models and AI to really understand and analyze the data across all these different sets, whether it's the operational data and again it can be the verbatim feedback, and again the verbatim feedback.

Chris Sutton: 29:47

We wouldn't do this on the benchmarking studies, but proprietary, it's not only surveys, it's social and call center feedback and then using those models to really help analyze the feedback. It's like you just can't do it without it. It's just too much. That's interesting. It's like you just can't do it without it.

Mike Chung: 30:01

It's just too much that's interesting, and a guy I talked to at a research company, kind of in the product development space, he talked about rather than this kind of long-form survey with the radio buttons, likert scales, there could be use cases where it's a singular question. Tell me something about the experience you just had. It could be good, bad or indifferent and it's like, oh, one thing that really went well for me was this, or I had a real problem with that and I suppose, with enough end size, being able to do sentimentality, ascribe sentimentality to certain keywords and phrases and, depending on how quantitative, qualitative, some combination thereof, that could perhaps be a way to get quickly feedback from a large number of people, whether or not you have follow-up questions or derivative questions that come up because something came up with customer service or product quality or X Y Z.

Chris Sutton: 31:07

It seems like there's a lot of thought being put into how to kind of cut to the chase, if you will, and I think the assumption is that with these historical, very traditional find that to your point that it is good for us is from the standpoint of look, in a lot of cases where we've conducted these studies, we already have the categorizations of these different things across. Let's say, value, people that we talked about at the start, including how customers wait, and put emphasis on those different areas. So in the example you have, when you're just getting tons of these verbatim comments and that they're unstructured feedback that you know based on the categorizations that we have, we're able to kind of fit those into these different categories with the sentiment it works fantastic. But you're right, it's like you have to be able to account for that, because the ability to get feedback from some customers in a traditional way it's going to change. So that's a great way to do it.

Mike Chung: 32:28

Yeah, and a lot of it will depend on the nature of the study.

Chris Sutton: 32:31

Because, if it's, a benchmarking study.

Mike Chung: 32:33

You have certain things you kind of have to ask. The same way, it makes perfect sense. I can imagine perhaps for some of the more. I think you call them proprietary studies where it's like okay, well, you know, this may not necessarily be an annual or a monthly metric. We can perhaps frame the question a different way.

Chris Sutton: 32:51

And that may also be a way, in the way you talked about it, because we had a lot of questions about okay, I'm understanding what's going on in my industry, but tell me a lot of exciting things that are going on in different industries and these ways of categorizing are maybe different ways. Different customers feel about convenience or value or a premium experience and luxury experience, and there's a lot of interest, especially within the premium side, of tell me what other premium brands are doing in the area of customer experience.

Chris Sutton: 33:24

And that's a way you can do that.

Mike Chung: 33:26

That's neat and, like you said, topics like that could cut across a variety of industries.

Chris Sutton: 33:32

Right, absolutely.

Mike Chung: 33:33

You know. One last question I can think of kind of trends in consumer behavior provider offerings. You alluded to this, or talked a little bit about it, in the context of mobile service, for instance. Um, tell me about other trends that you're seeing kind of like kind of keeping a finger on the pulse of as we kind of go into the future yeah, and again, this would be a little bit granular but, um, you know, as interesting is that we've been on the, again, retail automotive side.

Chris Sutton: 34:03

We'll do a lot of monitoring of the customer use of technology, whether it's, you know, scheduling online or texting with my provider and or I'm buying a car online, to be a little bit broader. And what's interesting is like most of that stuff it it if it changes, it changes incrementally. It doesn't really change as much as I think we would like it to, sometimes, you know, in the space of a year or two. One of the ones that has really been changing is this use of the retailers using, let's say, a video-based technology. I'm looking at your vehicle and taking a video or picture of it, I'm sharing and texting with the customer. At least on the traditional auto side, that has literally been. It's doubled in the last three years. Again, when our industry you just don't see things doubling in three years. You know it moves incrementally.

Chris Sutton: 34:54

And then I think to the earlier points, there's a lot of interest in this use of really making the customer experience much more convenient, because in the cases we're talking about, like mobile service, those things have a cost to them, you know, in terms of people and equipment, and they're, you know, those have to have an ROI associated with them or the implementation of it's not going to be great. So there's a lot of interest not only in what's the what is the convenience aspect, but does it really have an ROI in terms of loyalty? And I think that's the, you know. The takeaway for me is that I think we're coming into a little different phase of these industries right now, where you know, let's assume, the business may get a little bit tougher, is that there needs to be an ROI for a lot of these, and where you know, let's assume, the business may get a little bit tougher is that there needs to be an ROI for a lot of these. And you know that the convenience aspect really has an ROI for the provider.

Mike Chung: 35:53

Right and kind of to that. First, the first example that you're discussing the video kind of diagnosis, the text with a video clip. To me as the consumer, I can imagine that some of the quote-unquote challenges or things that may not make it an overnight process are many, many providers, the technological aspect of something as simple as Android versus iPhone. How long can that video be, making sure it's not like non-sendable because it's so large?

Mike Chung: 36:24

and providers, many workers and sort of like. There's a lot of places that things that need to be in place, so to speak.

Chris Sutton: 36:40

So I can imagine those are some of the sort of things. You know. You've got the cost and subscription of a service, so you have some hard cost and, to your point, you have the cost and energy of the technician using that, becoming comfortable and then communicating with the customer. But on the other side, is you know fairly quickly, is it helping me sell more service and you can then measure, is it creating a better customer experience? And I think for us that's why we're seeing that the rate of utilization has increased so much, because on the retailer side I can easily see does it have an ROI or not? And I can easily measure is the customer responding well to it?

Chris Sutton: 37:38

A lot of times we measure things. It's kind of hard to tell, you know, and in this case it's. But you know with, I think for us as a you know, a data and analytics company, it's sometimes we underestimate on the retailer side. Look like adopting these things. It's like you can't adopt them all. You got to pick one or two and they they do have a real and human cost associated with, with training and implementation too.

Mike Chung: 38:03

Definitely. Well, this has been a really fascinating discussion. I feel like we covered so much, and is there anything else that you'd like to highlight that perhaps we didn't touch on or that you thought about as we've spoken? Chris?

Chris Sutton: 38:15

No, I appreciate the time and, as always, enjoy the discussion, Mike, and again appreciate you having me on.

Mike Chung: 38:22

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