With the ever increasing online buying trend across industries, the automotive industry is no different. Buyers go to automotive ecommerce portals to start the buying process and submit their details for a lead follow-up. Lead handling process invariably requires interchange of data between many parties like customers, manufactures, dealers, service providers. There can be one or more heterogeneous systems involved in the entire process across organization boundaries. This requires an interoperable and standardized way of data interchange between parties. Auto-lead Data Format (ADF) is an industry standard to share lead information between tools.
Automotive ecommerce platform: overview
This document explains the process of creation of ADF/XML documents as part of the lead generation process on an automotive ecommerce platform. Lead generated is exported in ADF/XML in real time to be synched with dealers CRMs
The automotive ecommerce platform under discussion has an ecommerce marketplace and also hosts dedicated WordPress based websites where dealers can list their automobile catalog/inventories. It also has a lead management portal (LMP) to manage prospective leads for all dealers. Buyers browse through this marketplace and websites and fill up inquiry forms for vehicles of interest. These forms contain all the relevant information about the buyer, like their name, phone, email etc along with the details of the inventory of interest. The Marketplace portal is developed using standard webforms. Website lead forms are created using contact-form-7 plugin.
Lead export to dealer CRMs – ADF/XML integration
When a prospective buyer fills up an inquiry, lead information is sent to LMP over API and stored for lead management. It was a need felt by many dealers to integrate lead information in real time with their respective CRMs. To seamlessly integrate lead information with CRMs, the automotive industry came up with XML based interoperable and standard format – ADF/XML.
ADF/XML format
As mentioned above ADF/XML is an automotive industry standard to share lead information in XML format. Version 1.0 of this standard is primarily composed of following categories
- Vehicle: This tag is used to describe the vehicle that customer has requested
- Customer: It defines information about lead (prospective buyer)
- Vendor: This section provides information about the vendor, usually the dealer, that the customer has requested service from
- Provider: This category is optional. It is used to identify the service provider that originated the lead.
Detailed information regarding ADF version 1.0 standard can be obtained from https://adfxml.info
ADF/XML integration process
We followed steps enlisted in the standard document for ADF/XML based lead integration
- Register Dealer’s email with LMP
Every dealer that requires real time ADF/XML notifications needs to register their emails with LMP for notifications. This option was provided on LMP. Provision was given to have more than one email address registered for a dealer in that case lead notification will be sent to all those emails.
- Store lead information on LMP
Prospective buyers visit the marketplace or dealer’s website and browse through the catalog. Buyer fills in the relevant details like name, email, phone number along with details of inventory. Data filled in by buyers is sent over REST API to LMP over a secure https channel and stored as lead information.
- Generate ADF/XML format from lead information
When lead information is sent over HTTPS from marketplace/websites through API, appropriate XML library was used on LMP to create ADF/XML format (LMP is based on PHP-Laravel framework, hence its XML DOM document framework was used to generate below format
<?xml version=”1.0″?>
<?ADF version=”1.0″?>
<adf>
<prospect>
<requestdate>2022-09-27T11:05:09-04:00</requestdate>
<id sequence=”1″ source=”SourceName”>abc.com</id>
<vehicle interest=”buy” status=”new”>
<id sequence=”1″ source=”abc.com”/>
<year>2022</year>
<make>CAN-AM</make>
<model>vehicle-model</model>
<stock/>
<bodystyle>UTV/Utility Side by Side</bodystyle>
<vin/>
<price>15000</price>
</vehicle>
<customer>
<contact primarycontact=”1″>
<name part=”full”>customer full name</name>
<name part=”first”>customer first name</name>
<name part=”last”>customer last name</name>
<email>test@abc.com</email>
<phone type=”phone” time=””>xxxxxxxx</phone>
<address>
<street line=”1″/>
<city/>
<regioncode/>
<postalcode>xxxxx</postalcode>
<country>country-code</country>
</address>
</contact>
<comments>
<![CDATA[Comments: Test comments]]>
</comments>
</customer>
<vendor>
<id sequence=”1″ source=””/>
<vendorname>Demo vendor</vendorname>
<contact primarycontact=”1″>
<name part=”full”>xxxx</name>
<phone type=”voice” time=””>xxxxxxx</phone>
<address>
<street line=”1″>street 1</street>
<city>city-name</city>
<regioncode>xx</regioncode>
<postalcode>xxxxx</postalcode>
<country>country-code</country>
</address>
</contact>
</vendor>
<provider>
<name part=”full”>www.test.provider.com</name>
<service>EMAIL-DESKTOP</service>
<url>provider-url</url>
<email>provider-email</email>
<phone/>
<contact primarycontact=”1″>
<name part=”full”>Customer Service</name>
<email>provider-email</email>
<phone type=”voice” time=”day”/>
<address>
<street>street 1</street>
<city>city-name</city>
<regioncode>xx</regioncode>
<postalcode>xxxxx</postalcode>
<country>country-code</country>
</address>
</contact>
</provider>
</prospect>
</adf>
The above generated format is based on ADF/XML version 1.0 with some changes that is in compliance with the standard
- Real time ADF/XML lead notification to dealer
There are two standard transfer mechanisms options available for exchanging lead information:
- MIME/SMTP email: In this option, multipart MIME email is sent to an address furnished by the dealer. One part of the message is of type application/xml , and this is the ADF formatted lead. Another part of the message could contain a human-readable text version of the lead.This mechanism provides the ability to send ADF and human-readable leads in the same message, allowing it to be read either by a human or an xml parser.
- Simple Email: to be sent to the email address (as registered above). This email’s entire body should just contain the ADF lead with no additional commentary. It is a simpler option but does not support any UTF-8 characters.
We followed option no. 2 as a transfer mechanism in which ADF lead data was sent as part of the email body. ADF/XML format generated on step no. 3 was sent using a third party email service provider. PHP laravel event/listener publisher/subscriber model was used to send emails asynchronously. Below image shows the way in which ADF/XML lead was sent as email body
In today’s digital age as more and more customers are moving towards ecommerce and demanding rich customer experience, The entire process of lead management involves the transmission of data between parties like manufacturer, dealers, customers or even within a single organization between multiple verticals like IT and sales. Non existence of standard integration between heterogeneous systems and usage of different channels like (email, fax, proprietary) compounds tracking and management challenge in lead management. Thus usage of the automotive format like ADF/XML goes a long way in sending lead information across systems in an interoperable and standard way that can help the automotive industry to delight customers with immediate response, high quality customer management and a consistent experience.
This document showed the entire process by which an automotive platform can incorporate ADF/XML as a tool for lead integration thus enhancing efficiency of automotive dealers keeping in line with needs and demands of today’s digital auto-consumers.