At a time when margins are under pressure, costs continue to rise and the pace of change is rapid, being told to “innovate” can feel like another thing on an already overwhelming to-do list, says Jacqui Barker, Keyloop’s vice president global engagement strategy.
For many motor retailers, innovation sounds expensive and time-consuming. Something reserved only for large transformation programmes and businesses with dedicated innovation teams. Something that’s always just over the horizon.
But what if we’ve been thinking about innovation the wrong way?
What if the biggest opportunities aren’t hidden inside the next AI breakthrough, the next technology platform or the next major investment project? What if they’re already sitting in plain sight?
Research commissioned by Keyloop and conducted by OC&C suggests many of the motor retail’s biggest opportunities are hiding in plain sight:
- 83% of customers don’t know whether the information they’re seeing is accurate.
- 76% say they’ve been frustrated because online information wasn’t accurate.
- 69% describe the vehicle-buying process as feeling like they’re constantly “going back and forth”.
- 47% are not very satisfied with the overall buying experience
That’s not a technology gap. It’s an experience gap. Before we start looking for the next breakthrough technology, it’s worth asking a simple question: Why do these problems still exist?
Real understanding must come before reaching for tools
The answer isn’t usually a lack of software. In fact, when I visit motor retailers, I rarely hear leaders complaining that they don’t have enough technology. More often, I hear frustrations about disconnected processes, duplicated effort, inconsistent data and systems that don’t reflect the way customers actually want to buy.
Yet when we talk about innovation, our instinct is often to look for another tool. The reality is that technology rarely fixes a broken process on its own.
On my Drivetime podcast, Raúl Gómez Garrido from Toyota Motor Europe summed it up brilliantly: “You can’t just throw a tool at a tree and expect it to make a table.” He was talking about AI, but the point applies much more broadly. Tools have value only when they’re applied to a clearly understood problem. First, understand what’s broken. Then improve the process. Only then should you decide which technology can help.
That’s why, for me, innovation starts with curiosity.
Begin by understanding where people get stuck. It’s about asking what’s frustrating. Where are customers dropping out of the process? Where are employees wasting time? What tasks require unnecessary effort?
Often, the greatest opportunities for improvement are hiding inside the everyday friction we’ve simply learned to live with. In many cases, innovation looks less like transformation and more like housekeeping: removing unnecessary steps, simplifying processes and making it easier for people to do their jobs.
The people doing the job usually know what’s broken long before leadership does. The challenge is that innovation budgets and decision-making don’t always sit alongside the people experiencing the problem.
Service advisors know where processes slow down. Administrators know where information gets lost. And sales teams know where customers become frustrated. Yet innovation initiatives often begin in meeting rooms rather than in the places where friction actually exists. If you want better ideas, spend more time with the people closest to the challenge.
Simplify before you digitise
One of the biggest mistakes organisations make is digitising complexity.But a poor process doesn’t become a good process simply because it’s automated.
Before introducing new technology, ask whether the process itself can be simplified. Can steps be removed? Can ownership be clarified? Can information flow more easily? Sometimes the most powerful innovation isn’t adding something new. It’s removing something unnecessary.
Tesla understood this early. Former Tesla president Jon McNeill has spoken about a conversation with Elon Musk after they discovered it took 64 clicks to buy a car online. Musk compared it with the Domino’s app, where ordering a pizza took around 10 taps, and challenged the team to rethink the entire process. Instead of accepting lengthy documentation and endless steps, they asked a simple question: is all of this really necessary?
Borrow ideas from other industries
Consumers don’t compare dealerships solely with other dealerships, they compare every interaction against the best experiences they have elsewhere. When customers can open a Monzo account in minutes, track a Domino’s delivery in real time or complete large parts of a Tesla purchase journey online, those experiences shape expectations everywhere else.
Innovation often comes from looking outside your sector and asking what lessons can be applied within it. Someone else may have already solved your problem. One of my favourite examples of this comes from advertising strategist Rory Sutherland, who once proposed reserving some peak-time train seats for season ticket holders to tackle overcrowding. An engineer pointed out to him that airlines had already solved an analogous problem: frequent flyer programmes reward regular customers with preferential treatment.
Most businesses don’t suffer from a shortage of ideas, they suffer from a shortage of execution. Across every industry there are pilot graveyards: successful trials that generated excitement but never moved beyond the proof-of-concept stage. Someone has a great idea, the business tests it, people get excited.then nothing happens.
Ultimately, innovation only creates value when somebody owns the outcome and drives adoption across the organisation.
One of the biggest misconceptions about innovation is that it arrives in a single transformative moment. In reality, the most successful organisations treat it as a continuous and organic process
A process refined, a customer frustration removed, a task simplified. On their own, these changes don’t look revolutionary, but together, they can transform performance and that’s why I believe innovation starts with curiosity.
Not curiosity about technology, but curiosity about people, processes and experiences.
Author: Jacqui Barker, vice president global engagement strategy, Keyloop