I understand that drivvn was born out of the Summit business. What is the background to its formation?
In August 2020 we came into being. Summit had been working with automotive clients for four-and-a-half-to-five years. I guess at the end of 2019 (owner)TTC Group looked at what it was doing and saw that it had two quite different businesses working in one entity. The decision was taken to split that up. I joined in February 2020, and we moved the platform and clients across from Summit. We’ve always behaved as a start-up, with that agile mentality, but we actually started out with several OEM clients from day one. I joined from the marketing and tech company Unlimited Group. As a partner there I had been running one of the units, Prophecy, which was about customer acquisition and retention. My first impression was that we had a strong business that could be better. I didn’t think we were working in strong enough partnerships with our clients. I wanted to change that to make relationships work better on a strategic level as well as delivering the best customer journey we could. We needed to look very closely at the omnichannel journey between online, the OEM and the retailer.
The business seems to bring together quite a few strands of online retail. What are its core products?
We have two. At the front, we’ve got comparator that helps customers, particularly those looking at the EV (electric vehicle) transition and the cost of ownership versus ICE (internal combustion engine). You can do very small things like get answers to the question “is an EV right for me?” right through to selecting any model, from any brand, and comparing prices and scrutinising the cost of ownership. We then step into our e-commerce stores. Basically, as soon as you start to choose a model on a brand website, we can then support the whole journey, right from configuring the vehicle to setting up finance and buying the vehicle online. Our stores appear within the wider brand website, but we’re just in control of the configuration and that retail journey.
