- You represent the consumer in the room.
You need to bring the pain
points of the consumer
to the rest of the company.
And you need to help
solve these pain points,
and do it in a way that nobody else
in your industry can do it.
- Hey, I'm Sarah Franklin,
and welcome to "Connections."
I'm here in Washington, D.C.
to talk with CarMax CMO, Jim Liski,
about how they've been trailblazers
in the used car industry
for 30 years and counting,
making them the ultimate customer company.
Let's rewind 30 years back
when CarMax was the original disruptor
to the used car industry.
How important was it to focus
on the customer experience?
- Well, interesting, CarMax spun out
from a company called Circuit City.
What they tried to do
to distinguish themself
is to provide this great
customer experience
in kind of the CD electronics
business back then.
where they were trying to think about
how are we gonna diversify
into other businesses?
And they picked the sleeziest
one they could find,
in the used car industry.
And what they decided was,
if we can bring honesty,
integrity, and transparency
into this business,
we can put it on its head, we
can really do something great,
and that's what happened.
- How have you evolved CarMax
to give customers an omnichannel approach
that lets customers move easily
between online and in-person experiences?
- Super question, because
that is pretty much
the hardest thing we have to do right now.
So when we have the consumer in the store,
the old bricks and mortar model
that we've perfected over 25 plus years,
we're really good at that.
We make sure that you feel comfortable,
we understand your needs.
But when you go online now,
you don't have a sales
consultant holding your hand.
And so you can see how
if we can bring in that
the right kind of information in real-time
that's personalized to you,
we can help you have the confidence
that, "Yes, this is a good choice for me."
And then the very difficult part,
link all that online
activities you've done
with that store experience,
and make sure that's seamless,
that the sales consultant can see,
"Oh, this is exactly what they've done,
"I'm in a position now to help them
"in that last leg of the journey."
That we call omnichannel,
like a lot of retailers do,
that is the magic, that is being able
to leverage all your capabilities
to give that seamless experience
that is kind of bespoke to
that individual consumer.
- When you're buying a car,
you have so many choices.
How do you make that feel
personalized to your customer?
- Being able to personalize
the right vehicle
is really what some of
our best sales consultants
have done for the last couple decades,
they have very good knowledge
of all of the inventory.
But now when you're doing it online,
so what we've been able to do
is to take our vast amount
of data, billions of records,
of make, model, year,
mileage, features, options,
and then all the information
that we have about consumers.
We have a great recommendation
engine on carmax.com
that will be able to say,
these are probably the next
few cars you should consider.
Very similar to your Netflix experience.
- You're talking about basically AI
with the predictions
and the recommendations.
is going from predictive to generative.
How do you see that future for car buying?
- CarMax uses AI to connect with customers
by being able to take our
vast inventory of data
and expertise and distill it down
into an answer to a consumer's
question or problem.
We retailed, you know, over
750,000 units every single year,
and we've been doing that for
years, and years, and years,
so we have tons of consumer
reviews on our site.
And what we used was Open AI
to be able to configure those reviews
in a very digestible
way for our consumers.
Consumers get a ton of value out of it,
we actually get a lot of value at it
from Google and our other
friends with search engines,
and it's been a really good win.
- You've got a lot of
sophistication as a CMO
between AI, data, you said
like hundreds of millions
of records in your database
and CRM to do the personalized experience.
What would you recommend to other CMOs
that are trying to innovate
like you with AI, data, and CRM?
- You have to think about that,
you represent the consumer in the room.
You need to bring the pain
points of the consumer
to the rest of the company,
and you need to challenge
the rest of the company
to help solve these pain
points, and do it in a way
that nobody else in
your industry can do it.
And I'm lucky I have the product
organization reports to me,
I have everything I need
to be innovative and stuff.
But if you're a CMO who may
not have one of those parts,
go out and form the relationship you need
to be able to bring
those resources to bear
to solve consumer pain points in a way
that sets you apart from
everybody else in your industry.
- When you're doing big innovation
it's very easy to get big ideas,
but then feel like
you're boiling an ocean,
when you need to incrementally deliver.
How do you do that with Agile?
- We turn our product teams loose
on a segment of the consumer's problem,
so let's just say digital merchandising.
Consumers want to know what
that car really looks like,
and if it's really gonna meet their needs,
and they want to be
able to do that online.
And so we describe that car,
whether it's via words, pictures, videos,
and make it a very immersive experience
And they've done it
through 100 iterations,
and perfecting that experience.
- There's also the creative side,
and you've had some great
campaigns in market.
What would you say helps in
your decision making process
to create these campaigns
that really land with your
customers and prospects?
- I've been a CMO for a while.
- You're young, what are you talking ?
- And I think where I've landed now is,
you need to do a couple things
and do them very, very well.
The first one is, like it or
not, you have to break through.
You can have the greatest information
and provide that in a way,
and if you can't break through
the literally tens of
thousands of sound bites
going after the consumer,
it's not gonna matter.
So you have to think of a way
to break through the clutter.
You better take the few seconds you have
to tell them something that
nobody else is telling them,
and hopefully how you
are solving their pain
better than anybody else.
And good luck doing that in seven seconds,
but that's what you have to do.
- How important is it also
to win the trust of people
when you're marketing to them?
winning the trust of the
consumer is paramount.
It's a perceived high-risk purchase,
it costs a lot, I don't do it often,
and I don't know
everything about this car.
And so being able to
bring the brand to bear
to say, "I'm gonna take the
risk out of this for you,
"I'm gonna give you the
Love Your Car Guarantee.
"And what I mean by this is
I'm gonna let you drive it,
"test drive it for 24 hours
"and see if this car
really meets your needs.
"And if it does, great, buy it.
"If it doesn't bring it
back, drive another one.
"I'm gonna give you a 30-day
money back guarantee."
Those kind of things give
you the confidence that,
all right this decision,
yeah, it's a big decision,
but it doesn't have to be as
risky as I perceive it to be.
Since day one we've really focused in
on transparency, integrity, and trust.
And I think those are
still gonna be the things
we focus 30 more years from now.
- Thanks for tuning in
on "Salesforce Plus."
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