Why the need for Privacy is more than ever:
Covid has contributed to the automotive industry’s Digital Transformation journey by accelerating it by a decade. We witnessed dealerships embracing digitalization as their primary retail strategy.
North American dealers who provided digital services in 2020 have benefitted from the pandemic. According to Alan Haig, an automotive retail consultant and president of Haig Partners, nearly 30% of U.S. new car sales were completed online during the pandemic. On the other hand, the proportion of vehicles purchased digitally was less than 2% before the pandemic. A similar trend has also been observed in the Canadian automotive industry.
Source: Car Dealer Magazine
The move to digital introduced new revenue streams, a better customer experience. With all the benefits come new challenges such as privacy, security and compliance.
The current privacy challenge for the Dealerships:
Dealerships should be concerned about user privacy as their number one priority. The stakes are high for a company dealing with customer personal information if the wrong hands come into contact with it. It has been observed time and time again that companies that neglected these domains paid enormous fines This is because traditional CRM’s are not built to handle the new challenges and leave dealerships exposed to privacy and security vulnerabilities.
Here are a few of the most recent fallouts that should help you understand why privacy and security are so important:
- The California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) notified drivers on February 18, 2021, that they had suffered a data breach after their billing company, Automatic Funds Transfer Services, was hacked.
- 280 million Microsoft customer records held in a customer support database were left unprotected online on January 22, 2020.
- On February 20, 2020, over 10.6 million hotel guests who stayed at the MGM Resorts had their personal data exposed on a hacking forum.
- Zoom teleconferencing credentials for over 500,000 accounts were discovered on the dark web on April 14, 2020.
- The company Ancestry.com suffered an unauthorized server breach on July 20, 2020, that exposed sensitive data belonging to over 60,000 customers.
- 235 million Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube user profiles were uncovered by Comparitech researchers on August 20, 2020, at a site belonging to the defunct social media data broker, Deep Social.
- Hackers released a database on November 5, 2020, containing 1,852,595 records of staff, users, and subscribers for Mashable.com.
- A software vulnerability exposed the account information of an undisclosed number of users of the audio streaming service, Spotify, on December 10, 2020.
Info source: https://www.varonis.com/blog/data-breach-statistics
Unlike most industries, the automotive market has been untouched by Digital advancements. Taking into account the sales cycle is composed of more than ten different applications. This exposes the risk of data silos in which information is stored in separate locations, such as Excel spreadsheets, notepads, personal devices, and CRM.
How a Kitchener based tech firm, Dabadu, is making a difference:
“Our goal is not to add privacy as an add-on feature or an afterthought; instead we have embedded Privacy and Security by Design in our DNA. We help car dealerships build SPOT ( Single Point of Truth) which helps them operate efficiently and ensure security and Data Compliance.” Said Pulkit Arora, Founder & CEO of Dabadu.
If dealerships don’t have suitable controls in place, the increased data privacy and security risks could cause irreparable financial and punitive harm. Dabadu realized the need for a platform that could cater to all the needs of the sales representatives and designed a lead management platform that incorporated all the functionalities into one while adhering to all privacy laws. For instance, their lead management platform provides end-to-end data security, data encryption at rest. The system is built using data classification and have rules built in to support data retention policy
The company is dedicated to transforming the Canadian automotive market, and it has started by simplifying the business needs of dealerships while maintaining privacy. As of now, 15+ dealerships across Ontario have started adopting their platform, utilizing the collaborative and conjunctive tools it offers. The company endeavours to be the leader in providing dealerships across Canada with the latest digital tools to ensure Data Compliance.
