Vertu Motors revs up digital

Car retailer Vertu Motors has ramped up its finance signups for pre-COVID levels by going digital

Vertu has has built a fully-digitised remote vehicle purchase capability, drawing on Twilio’s communications tools.

It has been able to deliver a multi-channel digital showroom experience, encompassing all elements of the process, from meeting the dealer and looking at the vehicle to completing FCA-compliant finance paperwork.

Twilio Programmable Video was used to embed video chat into Vertu Motors’ Showroom product, which is used by its team for day-to-day interaction with all Vertu systems and customers.

Using video allowed the Vertu Motors team to do everything as though the customer was sitting in front of them in the dealership, from creating and presenting a deal to customers to working through finance calculators in a compliant way.

Lockdown

Furthermore, if the customer had a question about the vehicle they could not physically see, the Vertu Motors team could simply “walk” the customer over and let them see any elements they needed to be sure of via the tablet camera, giving them confidence to make often significant financial decisions at a distance

On average, since the beginning of the most recent lockdown, Vertu has been able to sell almost 3,000 cars a week without requiring customers to come into a dealership ahead of collection.

David Crane, chief operations officer at Vertu Motors, said: “This has not been a shift from analogue to digital: Vertu Motors was already moving forward with digital acceleration but the pandemic meant we had to put our foot on the accelerator.”