Customer Engagement and Lead Conversion in Automotive Retail

This exploratory research paper examines customer engagement and lead conversion at a private Škoda dealership in Pune, India. The study draws on a confirmed aggregate activity summary of 52 walk-in customers observed during a three-month internship, together with an anonymised 24-record enquiry extract. Of the 52 walk-ins, 45 completed a test drive, six booked within the internship period, and three additional bookings were known to occur later. The enquiry extract shows interest concentrated in the Slavia and Kylaq models, although the extract is not a complete cohort and cannot represent the dealership or market as a whole. Field observations from both authors inform a process-level interpretation of needs discovery, product explanation, test-drive coordination, and follow-up. The analysis is descriptive: it does not estimate causal effects, compare dealerships, or attribute booking outcomes to a single intervention. The findings suggest that a dealership should treat the test drive as an intermediate engagement stage and maintain a consent-aware, structured follow-up process that distinguishes in-period bookings from later conversions. The paper contributes a carefully bounded practitioner account of how customer-journey concepts can be applied to automotive retail while preserving the limits of a small, private operational dataset. Keywords: automotive retail; customer engagement; lead conversion; customer journey; exploratory research paper; Pune