CarMax Scales Digital Car-Buying Experience with Salesforce Platform

Quick take: The nation’s largest used vehicle retailer leverages Salesforce Platform’s low-code tools and elastic scale capabilities to efficiently deliver a new, all-digital buying experience and give them all the compute power they need, when they need it.

What’s the impact: With Salesforce Platform, CarMax can quickly develop new apps to digitize and automate internal processes, providing more time to focus on innovation and enhancing the customer experience. 

Using the capabilities of Salesforce Platform, CarMax was able to launch CarMax Curbside, their curbside delivery service, across the United States in less than three weeks.

What’s driving the news: Prior to 2020, CarMax was already using Salesforce Platform to develop a flexible omnichannel buying experience for customers — one that allowed customers to buy vehicles online, in store, or through a combination of the two. 

When the pandemic hit, this project was fast tracked as more customers began relying on digital tools to purchase vehicles. In order to meet these new customer expectations as fast as possible, CarMax doubled down on their use of Salesforce Platform. 

What they’re saying: 

Shamim Mohammad, EVP and Chief Information and Technology Officer, CarMax, said:

• “At CarMax, we went from a project-based, linear organization to a product-based, highly cross-functional empowered organization, and Salesforce played a significant role in making this happen.” 
• “By using Salesforce, we are now working with one integrated platform for managing customer relationships and automating our internal process, allowing us to increase the speed of our new innovations to continue advancing our customer experiences, ultimately redefining the future of the car buying process.” 
• “We’re excited to see the continued expansion of the Salesforce Platform through Heroku and Salesforce Functions, and we look forward to exploring these powerful technologies to drive innovation velocity at CarMax.”

Explore further: To fast track the development of an omnichannel buying experience, CarMax leaned heavily on Salesforce’s low-code development tools to build custom apps and workflows that streamlined time-intensive tasks.

CarMax also explored Salesforce Functions as a part of an early preview program, and saw potential for:

• Reducing org customization and complexity
• Better, faster, easier-to-maintain API integrations
• Leveraging open-source languages and frameworks
• Better integration of data and platform events

What’s next: Tune into Salesforce’s annual developer conference, TrailheaDX, on Wednesday, June 23 to learn more about how CarMax is using Salesforce Platform to accelerate car-buying innovation. Register for the free event here.