Customer experience (CX) is more than customer service. While customer service certainly influences CX, the concept extends throughout the entire relationship a customer has with your dealership, from their first online touchpoint or glimpse of marketing materials, through the end of the ownership cycle and beyond.

Getting CX right matters to a dealer’s bottom line, but it doesn’t happen by coincidence and it doesn’t happen just because you’re trying hard at it. It requires a data and evidence-based management strategy, backed by the right automotive data tools to empower your staff. In this blog, Mastermind shares:

 - What dealership customer experience management is, and why dealers need it

 - Why customer experience is critical to a dealership’s bottom line

 - How to create a customer experience management strategy that works for your entire dealership – with the tools your staff needs to succeed

What Is Customer Experience Management for Dealerships?

As with virtually any other facet of business, successfully delivering on CX requires defining and managing an actionable customer experience strategy. Without knowing what you’re trying to accomplish and bringing your team together in pursuit of that goal, you risk even the most well-intended teams pursuing inconsistent and potentially mutually-exclusive visions of customer experience that risk negating its value – or even causing unintended harm to your relationship with your customers.

Customer experience management is the process through which dealers come to understand what their customers care about so they can develop a vision and plan to meet those needs and expectations, defining goals and measuring progress at every appropriate touchpoint.

Even as increasing amounts of the research and communication involved in the automotive sales journey move online, consumers are expecting more personalized attention from their dealers at every touchpoint. Without a coherent customer experience management strategy, dealers risk failing to meet those expectations; losing customers to dealers who deliver on them.

Why Dealership Customer Experience Matters

Research is clear that the automotive customer experience plays a critical role in dealership bottom lines. For instance, research from Capgemini found that more than half of American car buyers would change dealers after experiencing poor customer service as early as the interest phase of a car purchase.

However, the dealership customer experience isn’t all about avoiding dissatisfaction. The same survey found that customers who’ve had a positive shopping and service experience at a dealership are willing to pay for that experience – in fact, more than 60 percent of them are willing to spend as much as 24 percent more.

An Autotrader survey broadly agrees, finding that more than half of consumers would buy from a dealership that offered their preferred experience, even if it didn’t have the lowest price, and two thirds said that in general, they are much more likely to buy from a dealership that provides their preferred customer experience. 

Additionally, while 65 percent of customers said they would drive further to buy from a dealer who had the lowest price, even more – 73 percent – said they’d drive further to close a deal with a great salesperson.

How to Create a Customer Experience Management Strategy

The key components of  creating a customer experience management strategy are:

1. Understand what your customers care about

2. Define a vision for how your relationship with those customers will fit into those expectations

3. Share the vision broadly and consistently throughout the entire dealership. Work with your team to define measurable goals at each customer touchpoint that contribute to achieving your visionEnsure that your team has the training, tools, resources and authority to meet those goals

4. Measure your progress toward those goals, including through direct feedback from customers

5. Update your strategy based on your measurements and feedback

A successful customer experience management strategy begins with understanding what your customers care about, and that means often considering feelings more than facts. Emotions are incredibly important when it comes to CX, and dealers can’t focus so much on hold times and satisfaction surveys that they forget to simply look at how they’re making their customers feel about the entire relationship.

A Harvard Business Review study defined a number of “emotional motivators” that drive consumer choices, and many of them hold opportunities for dealers to create emotionally motivating connections: “Stand out from the crowd,” “Enjoy a sense of well-being,” “Feel a sense of belonging,” “Feel secure” and “Succeed in life” all offer potential avenues of emotional connection to customers. 

When you’re defining and sharing your vision, that must involve making sure that your employees understand how you want your customers to feel about their interactions with your dealership. What kind of emotional connections are they being asked to make or encourage?

Arming Your Staff With the Right Tools to Succeed

From a practical and more measurable perspective, there’s a great deal of strategic value to focusing resources on the exact things that your customers aren’t expecting you to do well. The Capgemini research that found more than half of car buyers would change dealers over poor customer service during the car-buying process also identified areas where dealers had the most ground to make up to meet their expectations: Quality of answers from dealer staff, speed of customer service and proactiveness by staff. All of those are measurable and go directly to customer experience.

Fortunately, these are exactly the areas in which automotive analytics tools such as Market EyeQ can help dealers make huge strides. When dealership employees proactively receive the information they need about a customer, the quality of their interactions improves along with the speed with which they’re able to address customer needs.

Additionally, behavior prediction tools offer dealers an unparalleled opportunity to move from a reactive to proactive model for many customer interactions, improving the customer experience to meet their expectations . They also deliver additional measurement and management tools, empowering dealership leaders to constantly review, update and effectively manage their strategy.

Are you interested in seeing how Mastermind’s solutions can power a transformative dealer customer experience management strategy? Contact us today to set up a free demonstration. 

A productive and efficient sales team is the lifeblood of a dealership. While many auto dealer sales trainings focus on big-picture tips and tricks, not enough dig into the core factors that truly help dealership salespeople succeed: finding high-quality prospects; knowing what motivates those prospects to buy; and nurturing customers with the kind of experience that ensures dealer loyalty. 

Car sales training matters. But when it comes to empowering salespeople, all the training in the world can’t replace the customer data and analytics-driven capabilities of a modern digital sales platform in creating an environment for success. In this blog post, automotiveMastermind discusses how to:

- Fill the pipeline with high-quality sales leads without breaking the bank

- Arm salespeople with the information and insights they need to close more deals

- Ensure the entire dealership is committed to ensuring a great customer experience

Filling the Car Sales Funnel

For auto dealers, customer prospecting goes back to the day the first store opened its  door

s. For a century, dealership sales teams have been unhappy with the quality of their leads and managers have tried to manage their marketing budgets without crippling their sales forecast. Modern personalized marketing, analytics, lead management, and sales tools for dealers aren’t going to eliminate more than a century’s worth of history and habit. But they do give dealers a powerful set of capabilities to improve the quality of leads a salesperson receives, while lowering the cost of acquisition for dealers by identifying and targeting potential customers who are most likely to purchase a vehicle. Personalized dealership marketing tools are able to do this because they don’t rely on “spray and pray” advertising to broad demographics such as TV viewers, radio audiences, ZIP code residents, or the like. 

Rather, they consider essentially every consumer in the dealer’s entire market and analytically score them by the factors that make them more or less likely to purchase one of the dealer’s vehicles. Simply by doing this, they’ve already performed a valuable service to a sales team by identifying the best – and worst – prospects in the market, cutting down on time and effort wasted on unqualified shoppers. 

Other prospects will show up in your service drive. Industry figures suggest it’s five times cheaper to conquest a non-sales service customer than it is to acquire one through traditional marketing channels, which is where our Service Conquest marketing solution helps dealers turn this flow of potential prospects into qualified and actionable leads for their sales teams.

How to Arm Salespeople with the Customer  Information and Insights they Need to Succeed

“Know your customer,” auto sales professionals are told from their first day in the industry. Today, they can know more – and do more with that knowledge – than ever before. If knowing your customer is the key to success, then arming your salespeople with deep and actionable information about their prospects is one of the most powerful things you can do to help them confidently sell and consistently succeed.

That information comes from a variety of sources and includes both information that a good salesperson would likely have looked up already about a prospect as well as proprietary information from private databases, credit bureaus, and research firms. But time is precious for salespeople, and data overload is often worse than no information at all. That’s where the power of predictive marketing analytics comes in, working its way through the sea of data to identify the most relevant and important information and highlight opportunities and areas of concern in simple bullet-point form for the salesperson to have in hand before their first conversation. 

Of course, there’s both an art and a science to using all this information and insights. Mastermind’s technology is designed to be intuitive, and easy to understand and use at any skill level. Getting the most value out of new personalized marketing, analytics, lead management, and sales tools requires training. That’s why Mastermind offers not only introductory car sales training for new salespeople but also ongoing, personalized car sales training to ensure that every member of the sales team is able to use these tools as successfully as possible – at no additional expense to the dealer. Consider us an extension of your sales team!

Consistent Dealership Customer Experience

Salespeople can’t do it alone. They need tools, specialized support such as a well-designed and managed business development center (BDC),  great F&I colleagues and strong leadership. But what a sales team really needs to make a dealership successful is to be part of a dealership team that’s committed to delivering a consistently great customer experience.

Dealers know customers aren’t solely won or lost on the sales floor, but it’s only relatively recently that some dealers have started to truly embed a commitment to customer service throughout their entire dealership. For those that have been successful in doing so, the benefits are significant and quantifiable on the sales floor.

Happy customers come back, again and again, boosting your dealership’s retention and CSI scores. This isn’t news to dealers. But ongoing research into “customer experience” – or “CX,” as it’s known – and its value in the dealership environment has shown the power that a consistently well-treated customer has to make the sales process faster, more cost-effective and easier for the sales team. 

For maximum value in putting salespeople in a position to succeed, CX is much more than simply a philosophy of customer service. Rather, it’s a data and analytics-driven process that ensures everyone in a dealership who comes into contact with a customer has access to both the necessary information and the important insights about that customer.

Modern customer experience management tools are also constantly keeping track of those interactions, watching and learning more about the customer and how they behave. When it comes time for their next vehicle, analytics watching the automated interaction between the service drive, F&I team, marketing and sales functions will often be aware of the customer’s readiness for a new car before they are. A trained salesperson armed with these data-driven insights as they reach out to a highly-scored customer who’s had an excellent experience with the entire dealership is in the best possible position to succeed.

What would that look like in your dealership and what difference could it make for your bottom line? Contact us to set up a demo today.

As game-changing as the Internet has been for dealers, the best way to sell more cars at a dealership continues to be getting more customers in the door and onto the showroom floor. In this article, automotiveMastermind covers four ways to increase customer traffic at your dealership:

- Have the vehicles they want and make them easy to find 

- Target prospects who have never stepped foot in your dealership

- Use personalized marketing messages to contact prospects in the most effective manner

- Provide a great customer experience to help encourage dealership loyalty

Have the vehicles customers want and make them easy to find

It may seem simplistic to say that the best way to increase car sales is to have the cars on hand that people want to buy, but it’s surprising how many dealerships aren’t successful at this. It’s critical to have a varied inventory, because today’s Internet-enabled shopper is going to be able to find a dealership that has the trim package they want on their lot and you’ll have lost the chance at a sale.

This, of course, also gives you the opportunity to be that dealership. One of the lowest-effort conquesting options you have to get someone onto your lot is simply to make sure as much of your inventory as possible is listed on the third-party sites where people browse for cars in their area. This is especially useful when it’s integrated into the responsibilities of a well-run Business Development Center team that is focused on connecting with Internet leads and turning them into sales appointments that get those new customers in the door and engaged with the sales team.

Target prospects who have never stepped foot in your dealership

It’s simple math, in a way: If you want to increase customer traffic through your doors and sell more cars at a dealership, one of the best ways to do so is to bring in new customers who haven’t been there before. Loyalty is critical (we’ll get to that in a moment), but growing the business requires identifying new dealership leads and converting them into hot prospects who are standing next to the car, talking to a salesperson.

For almost a century, dealers largely did this through advertising and direct mail. Dealers used “spray and pray” marketing and advertising messages to broad consumer demographics in their markets that they believed were the most fertile ground for the cars they were trying to move. 

Today, through data and analytics-based marketing, dealers can move from marketing to demographic groups to personalized marketing. This involves using a combination of proprietary and publicly-available databases to identify and score potential prospects as dealership leads, using a system that constantly learns from your real-world results to improve its ability to pick out the best prospects in your market and develop an individualized marketing campaign to get them in the door.

This leads us to:

Use personalized dealership marketing messaging to contact prospects in the most effective manner

Personalized marketing means contacting the right person, with the right message, at the right time and in the right format.

Once your predictive marketing tools have identified the prospects in your market who are the highest-quality dealership leads, the focus turns to using what you know about those prospects to get them in the door. It starts with putting together the right offer components, with the right vehicle and terms to fit their situation, based on data from a variety of sources. It involves not only using the right channel – direct mail, digital or otherwise – but also a cadence of touchpoints and connections that is appropriate for where they’re showing themselves to be in the sales cycle and that changes with their interactions – or inaction.

When you connect to the most qualified prospects with messaging that is relevant to their unique needs and circumstances, the results are higher response rates, increased customer traffic to your dealership and ultimately increased sales at a much higher ROI.

In today’s marketplace, consumers don’t view personalized marketing as an intrusion when it’s making them an excellent offer on a product they truly want. Great personalized marketing is a solid foundation for the broader customer experience they’ll have with your dealership, and the start of a relationship that can pay dividends for years to come.

Provide a great dealership customer experience to help word of mouth and encourage loyalty

Today’s consumers have been trained by analytics-driven companies like Amazon and Netflix to expect you to know just as much about what they want and need – and maybe even more – than they do. Ironically, the transformation of the American business landscape by data and artificial intelligence has increased consumers’ expectations that they will receive personalized, human service from the companies with whom they’re doing business. And when that business involves the largest purchase they’re likely to make that year (or more), they are holding dealers to a customer experience standard that many traditionally-successful dealers are failing to meet.

Dealers have long understood that their customers care about the totality of their experience. That’s why they’ve invested in everything from free coffee in the service waiting area to major showroom upgrades. But in today’s economy, truly impactful customer experience – often abbreviated “CX” – goes beyond having a baby changing area or service satisfaction follow-up call.

The kind of dealership CX that makes a true difference in building loyalty, increasing your word of mouth and improving your bottom line requires you to arm your team with meaningful information and insights about the customers with whom they are interacting. Your customers consider themselves to have a relationship with your dealership as a single entity, and expect the dealership to return the compliment by treating them as a valued customer in every department, even when they’re interacting with a new team after only ever having been a sales or service customer in the past. In most dealerships, it’s the gaps and handoffs between departments that cause the greatest CX frustrations that degrade loyalty and can ruin a multi-year relationship in moments.

Can your dealership use some help in getting more customer traffic through the showroom door? Contact us today to learn how a data-backed automotive sales platform can help identify and convert the best prospects in your market.

How Dealerships Can Increase Service Drive Profitability

How can your dealership increase its service drive profitability? As consumers wait longer than ever before between new vehicle purchases, refining your dealership’s service department process to generate more revenue can make a critical difference in your dealership’s bottom line. In this blog post, automotiveMastermind discusses:

-  Why the service drive has become a key component in dealership revenue & the importance of  service drive loyalty

- How to grow service revenue and loyalty with actionable tips

- How to dedicate a sales team member to the service drive – and equip them with the right tools

If your customers aren’t buying new vehicles, then they’re repairing old ones. American consumers are hanging onto their vehicles longer, to the point where the average car or light truck on the road today is 11.6 years old. Incredibly, that’s three years older than the average just two decades ago.

Why the Service Drive Has Become a Key Component in Dealership Revenue

As vehicles get older, they require more maintenance. This is one factor why new-car dealership service revenues across the industry have been growing strongly in recent years, increasing from slightly more than $80 billion in 2011 to $116 billion last year. According to NADA, last year the average new-car dealership netted 16.2 percent of its profit from service parts and labor, writing 18,544 orders per year for an average staff of 16 technicians (including body shop).

Service revenues are not only key to a dealership’s bottom line, but service loyalty also drives sales loyalty. For dealers who want to grow their share of both revenues and loyalty, below are some simple data-driven suggestions on how to run a dealership service department in today’s competitive landscape.

How to Grow Service Revenue and Loyalty:

Don’t Be Afraid to Compete on Cost

It’s no secret to anyone who manages a dealership service department that consumers believe it is the most expensive place to get their vehicle serviced. That’s one reason why far too many customers stop visiting the dealership service drive once their warranty expires. Dealerships that in the past have balked at putting pricing online or marketing based on price because of a fear of being comparison-shopped against lower-cost independents must meet this consumer concern head-on.

While industry data does show a price differential, it’s also usually less than customers expect – and that difference can be tied directly into the needs and desires of today’s consumer. For instance, dealers have long promoted the perceived quality benefits of dealership service technicians and genuine parts in their marketing outreach. But with the aging vehicle fleet on the road, it’s time for dealer service marketing campaigns to connect those perceived benefits to the customer’s desire to have their vehicle performing at a high level as long as possible. Consumers who hope to drive their existing car or truck for many years after their warranty has expired will be more open to quality messaging such as, “We have the expert technicians and factory-quality parts to keep your car or truck running great for years to come,” and more sensitive to suggestions that they would be sacrificing quality and long-term dependability by entrusting their vehicle to the low-cost competition.

Treat Service Business as a Local Business

Research regularly finds that consumers are unlikely to travel more than 20 miles for a car service, and almost three-quarters of vehicle service visits take place within 10 miles of a customer’s home. Rather than fighting this, focus on marketing to your existing local customers with proximity and convenience messaging to try to keep as much of their business as possible out of the hands of local independents, tire stores, quick lubes and other competitors.

That 10-mile radius should also be prime service drive conquest territory for your marketing campaigns, starting with local brand owners who purchased their vehicle from another dealership and expanding into other owners whose vehicles your technicians are prepared to repair.

Today’s social media and digital advertising platforms have powerful geographic capabilities, and your service drive marketing campaigns should be taking advantage of them to ensure you’re not spending marketing dollars trying to sell service visits to consumers who are outside your local market. Is the team managing your service department marketing campaign focusing tightly on the consumers who are most likely to visit your service drive, or are they spending your resources on unlikely audiences?

Dedicate a Drive to the Most Time-Sensitive Services

Many consumers believe independent mechanics or specialized franchise tire, lube, air conditioning or brake shops are much quicker than dealership service drives for standard maintenance services or state safety inspections. In order to keep your existing customers and effectively conquest that business back from those competitors, you need to address the speed/convenience concern head-on by reducing or eliminating their advantage.

Review how those kinds of orders are handled within your dealership service department process and consider setting up a dedicated service drive or repair bay for those kinds of repairs, and marketing it directly against local competitors on speed, cost and competence.

How to Integrate the Service Drive with Sales

Great service performance supports great sales performance and service loyalty drives sales loyalty. In fact, industry data suggests that after five service visits, a customer is three times more likely to purchase their next vehicle from your dealership. Service conversion, when done effectively, is a tremendously powerful and efficient method of sales prospect generation. It depends not only on ensuring that your service drive is providing an excellent customer experience, but also on ensuring you have the right people and processes in place to connect your service and sales departments so you’re taking advantage of that connection.

Does your dealership have someone dedicated to converting service customers into sales prospects, reaching out to high-quality sales prospects with service appointments to schedule a quick discussion while they’re in the dealership? What tools have you provided that dedicated person to identify the best prospects, and how much do they know about the people who will be showing up in your service drive that day? Do they have the right resources and authority to structure an offer and close a sale? If the prospect isn’t quite ready to close but still worth keeping as a prospect, how is that relationship handled and who is responsible for keeping it active and working it toward closure?

Dealerships that are doing the best at converting service customers into vehicle sales have answered those questions, using processes and tools such as serviceMastermind, part of the Market EyeQ sales platform. Contact us to set up a consultation today.

Using data to help your sales staff truly understand their customers and anticipate their needs will lead to a better overall experience in your dealership. In this article, automotiveMastermind builds on an airline analogy to help showcase the need for a holistic approach to dealer customer experience (CX):

• - While all facets of an airline staff work independently, much like your dealership, the work is interwoven in the eyes of the customer

• - Provide your team with resources, capabilities and authority to build a great CX

• - Drive customer loyalty through consistent CX

The last time you took an airline flight, how was your customer experience? What goes into answering that question for you – and what does it tell you about your dealership’s customer service?

On your last flight, was the check-in disorganized or understaffed? Were the flight attendants unable to provide the beverage you requested during in-flight service? Maybe the airplane restroom wasn’t clean enough, or your baggage took too long to arrive?

Did you walk away happy, or not?

An airline’s gate staff, flight crew, aircraft maintenance and baggage claim functions are as operationally independent – if not more so – than the marketing, sales and customer service teams in your dealership. But just as you instinctively assess your experience with an airline as a totality of how you felt in every facet of that process from your first interaction to your last; so too do your customers feel about their experience with your dealership. Just as you think of “the airline” without stopping to assess the different operational areas by which they divide themselves, so too do your customers think of you as “the dealership” without differentiating between marketing, sales, finance, or service.

A Holistic Approach to Dealer Customer Experience

It is critical for your entire organization to have a holistic view of customer service, based on the concept that a customer’s experience – “CX” – is as unified for you as it is for them. That means while you may keep operational areas separately managed, those divisions – and the handoff between them – need to be as seamless and invisible as possible to your customers. This happens with careful analysis and planning of the entire customer experience, through dedication to building a customer experience culture and through providing your team with the resources, capabilities and authority to deliver those experiences regardless of where that customer is in your organization at any given time.

Use Data to Understand Your Customers

This all begins with understanding your dealership’s customers. In the old days, the mantra told us to “Know your customer.” That’s still true, of course, but it’s no longer good enough to end at simply knowing who they are. In a world where your TV recognizes what you want to watch, your GPS can predict where you’re going when you get in the car and Amazon knows what you’d like to buy before you do, your customers expect you not just to know who they are but also to understand their wants, needs, interests, expectations and concerns.

It’s admittedly ironic that the path to understanding your customers as unique individuals for whom you tailor customized experiences starts with the impersonal logic of databases and machine learning, but there’s no other way to accomplish that objective at the kind of scale a dealership requires. The more your employees know about a customer and the more context they’re provided by the automated tools that do the homework for them, the better they’re able to understand that customer and interact with them in a way that maximizes their customer experience and cements their relationship with your organization.

Be Consistent

However, simply having the right information about a customer and having people in place who are engaged in using data to provide great customer experience isn’t enough, if the experience isn’t consistent. Just as the example of your experience with all the facets of an airline shows how one underperforming component can sour an entire experience, so too can an under-performing part of your dealership.

Nobody credits the airline with getting to the gate on time or remembers the smiling flight attendant who gave them an extra bag of peanuts. Similarly, your marketing could be on point, your sales process a joy and the vehicle delivered in pristine condition with a smile – but if the finance process was painful and impersonal, that’s what your customer will remember. You can’t afford to tolerate any under-performing component of your dealership when it comes to customer experience, because that’s what will end up defining the experience your customer remembers and limiting the potential of your future relationship with them.

Build from the Foundation

Great dealer customer experiences build loyal, high-value customers. They’re the foundation of a sustainable dealership model that lets you protect existing market share while you use the same digital capabilities that underpin your CX operation to expand your marketing reach and conquest new customers. But just as your airline can do everything right except lose your luggage and expect you to walk away happy, neither can you afford to depend on some areas of greatness to counterbalance pain points for your customers.

Where are your customers not having a great experience – and what are you doing about it? Are you ready to truly understand your customers and ultimately sell more vehicles? Contact us today for a VIP consultation.

Shaping company culture around the customer experience is what led Amazon to become one of the most successful companies of all time. In this article, automotiveMastermind covers why dealerships should adopt this method to drive dealer customer retention and how they can do it with three tips:

- Instill a culture built on great dealership customer experience

- Manage the dealership culture you defined

- Recognize and reward employee engagement

What makes customers want to buy a car from your dealership? What makes them repeatedly brand and dealer loyal?

These are simple questions with enormously complex answers. One consistent theme underpinning the entire dealer-customer relationship is CX, or customer experience. And while there are a variety of factors that play into customer experience, the constant across all of them is that at the end of the day, it’s the human interactions between your dealership staff and your prospects and customers that matter more than anything else. That’s a reflection of your dealership’s culture, which doesn’t always happen organically. It takes devotion along with consistent and effective management – and leadership by example – to instill, grow and maintain such a culture in any business.

Creating a culture that delivers a great car-buying experience is worth the work because that experience is what sells cars and keeps a dealership’s customers coming back, in good times and bad. Customers want to do business with people they like and who treat them well. When that happens, they’re far more likely to become loyal repeat customers who make an outsized impact on your bottom line year after year and sales cycle after sales cycle.

Instill a culture built on great dealership customer experience

How do you instill the type of culture where customers are valued and appreciated and where the customer’s experience is the most important factor in any decision? It starts with defining it and setting expectations for employee engagement. How do you expect people to operate in your dealership? How do you expect them to treat each other and the customer? How are they empowered in their pursuit of doing the right thing?

For example, Amazon’s workplace culture is famously competitive. In his first letter to shareholders after taking Amazon.com public in 1997, Jeff Bezos talked in depth about his plans for building a company for the long term during a time of great industry change. This included setting cultural expectations for Amazon’s employees: “When I interview people I tell them, ‘You can work long, hard, or smart, but at Amazon.com you can’t choose two out of three,” he wrote. Amazon also publishes and holds its managers to a set of “Leadership Principles” that promote its desired culture, including its famous “Customer Obsession” – “Leaders start with the customer and work backwards. They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. Although leaders pay attention to competitors, they obsess over customers.”

You may not believe Amazon’s unique culture would be right to transplant into your dealership, but one core lesson from their success is it’s your job to define your desired culture, explain it and then manage to it as part of a broader go-to-market strategy.

Managing the dealership culture you defined

Once you have culture defined and explained to your team, the management component is critical to turn words into reality. You can’t do good work without the right tools, and you can’t expect your team to deliver meaningfully personalized service to your customers if you don’t arm them with the tools to do so. This means investing in analytics-driven capabilities such as database access for consumer insights, credit transparency tools, targeted marketing campaigns, service history integration and other solutions. These tools allow your team to do their homework and come prepared to make the right offer, at the right time, for the right vehicle and at the right price.

Customer experience is about human interactions, but the best human interactions take place when the employee has all the information they need ahead of time to meet the customer’s unique needs.

Recognize and reward employee engagement

If you show your employees you’re serious about investing in a customer experience-driven culture and giving them the tools to do it right, then they’re more likely to take it seriously and become a part of making that culture a reality. Without that kind of visible commitment, your staff likely won’t take your commitment to customer service seriously – and neither will the customers with whom they’re interacting.

When your employees do get it right, reward them quickly and meaningfully. Famed General Electric CEO Jack Welch joked that employee recognition should involve “the right mix of plaques and cash,” and that’s been a part of the standard dealership management toolkit for decades. Culture is more than sales numbers, so don’t just reward on sales metrics or other financial targets.

In addition to those kinds of recognition, make the effort to find ways to reward the behavior that values coworkers and customers. Recognize and reward creativity in solving customers’ problems, covering for coworkers who have family emergencies, staying late as needed without being asked, showing respect for customers’ unique needs and the like.

At the end of the day, you’re trying to create a culture in which your dealership demonstrates that it cares about its customers, at every possible opportunity, because a dealership full of people who truly care is the kind of dealership customers stick with for life. So, reward people for demonstrating that they care, and for doing their part to grow that customer experience-driven culture.

The more employees know that healthy and positive behavior is rewarded, the more they will embrace your culture and become partners in growing the kind of environment in which great customer experiences are born, and one where the bottom line grows along with the relationships you build.

Are you serious about investing in a customer experience-driven culture? Contact us today to learn how a data-backed automotive sales platform can drive exceptional customer experience.

Automotive sales forecasts are leaving many dealers feeling less than optimistic about the future of dealership sales. In order to remain profitable in a flattening market, dealers must keep a pulse on everything that’s happening in the industry. In this post, automotiveMastermind dives into the automotive industry trends from Q1 2019 that dealers need to be aware of, including:

• Dealership Lots Overflowing Due to Underwhelming Vehicle Sales
• Divergent 2019 Retail Strategies from Tesla & Porsche
• A Scarcity of Automotive Service Technicians

Underwhelming Vehicle Sales, Overflowing Lots

What:
As car retail sales slowed across the auto industry, the number of vehicles on dealers’ lots hit an all-time high this quarter. Even famously “recession-proof” brands such as Jeep have suffered, posting consecutive monthly sales declines.

Why:
NADA and others continue to sound alarms over vehicle affordability, which means not only sticker shock but also financing challenges for consumers. Dealers need to make sure their marketing and sales efforts include a data-based view of a prospect’s financial situation, ensuring they’re not investing resources on an offer a customer can’t afford or other unqualified leads.

That’s why Mastermind built a relationship with consumer credit experts TransUnion, so information can be built into the consumer relationship as early as possible. When combined with data-based marketing outreach that looks at every potential customer in the market to score and identify the bestprospects for a targeted and individualized marketing and sales campaign, this model of analytics-based selling is the fast lane to meeting month-end targets and moving vehicles off the lot.

Tesla and Porsche Take Different Retail Roads

What:
Two premium automakers announced very different strategies for their retail footprints as 2019 got underway. While Tesla made news saying it would roll back its already-sparse retail footprint, Porsche unveiled plans to invest in the customer experience at its dealerships to connect consumers even more closely to the brand.

In a blog post and SEC filing, Tesla said it was “shifting sales worldwide to online only,” and that “Over the next few months, we will be winding down many of our stores, with a small number of stores in high-traffic locations remaining as galleries, showcases and Tesla information centers.”

Meanwhile, Porsche was accelerating in the opposite direction, unveiling a “Destination Porsche” retail concept that makes its dealerships “not just a place to transact business, but a place that you would want to come in and soak up Porsche culture,” according to company COO Joe Lawrence. This includes holding motorsport-watching parties, hosting local Porsche owner group events and other related content. This announcement came after the ninth consecutive year of U.S. sales growth and seventh record sales year in a row. Porsche North America sales set a record of 57,202 vehicles.

Why:
Both Porsche and Tesla have passionate consumers, but the two companies have deeply divergent views of the dealership’s role in building and maintaining that relationship.

Porsche treats the dealership as a critical part of its customer relationship, winning its luxury segment in the 2019 J.D. Power Customer Service Index. Its intention with “Destination Porsche” is to make the dealership a place consumers want to be, making it the center of a rich customer experience that goes beyond sales or service, and builds opportunities for engagement to increase loyalty and amplify customer retention efforts.

Tesla, however, acts as if the dealership – or “store,” to avoid state dealership laws – is almost a necessary evil, stressing all Tesla sales take place online. Even though CEO Elon Musk wrote, “stores and Tesla product specialists and owner advisors will always be of critical importance to our long-term success,” his view of the dealership role is highly transactional: “Many potential Tesla owners will still want to talk to a Tesla representative in person or want a test drive from a Tesla representative,” he wrote, adding, “Stores also have a small number of Tesla vehicles available to drive away immediately for customers that want a car right then and there.”

Tesla appears to view the retail footprint as a cost center rather than a revenue generator. This was clear when it announced a change in plans not long after its initial store-closing announcement, saying it would “keep significantly more stores open than previously announced” but that “As a result of keeping significantly more stores open, Tesla will need to raise vehicle prices by about 3% on average worldwide.”

Tesla delivered its first car in 2008 and introduced its first mass-market model in 2012, while Porsche has been selling cars to consumers since 1948. To date, Tesla has been almost entirely in conquest mode and had little need to engage in retention marketing. As the company matures and its customers start reaching the end of their ownership cycles, it will be interesting to see whether Tesla’s model for minimizing the dealership role in the automotive industry is a sustainable bet and whether making a vehicle purchase “not much harder than ordering an Uber,” as Musk put it, is all that’s necessary to keep customers coming back.

Service Technicians Stay Scarce

What:
Auto Dealers are having a hard time hiring and keeping automotive service technicians. One estimate from NADA is that between retirements and career changes, dealers need to hire roughly 76,000 technicians a year just to keep up with demand. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts there will be 45,900 more service techs needed in a decade.

Dealers still appear to be attracting qualified technicians by offering more than other employers:
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median salary for a service technician at an auto dealer is $43,180, compared to $37,420 at collision shops or independent repairers or $33,640 at tire stores or parts & accessories shops.

Why:
The dealership service experience is critical for a customer’s overall satisfaction and customer retention. The right number of qualified, capable technicians is a huge part of that, without enough of them, customers wait longer for repairs, often resulting in customer dissatisfaction. Also, Under-qualified techs are also more likely to fail to complete a quality repair, leading to return visits that can cause harm to a customer’s satisfaction with the dealership.

It’s not news to dealers that service tech recruitment and retention is an important part of the business, but with a bleak hiring landscape stretching out a decade or more, there’s no better time than now to make a serious commitment not only to retaining the techs you have, but also to finding innovative ways of recruiting more to meet the needs of the future.

All of this should occur as part of a comprehensive overhaul of the service department’s place in the dealership, integrating the service drive as a sales driver and making analytics-based contact with a customer, a regular part of the service drive process.

How Can Mastermind Help?

Do you have questions about how car sales trends are changing the customer experience
process? Contact us today to learn more about how Market EyeQ can help your dealership identify, communicate with and close more buyers in your market.

If there’s one word that looks like it will define 2019, it’s “demand.” Consumer demand for new or used vehicles is expected to be down, potentially delivering a second year of lower sales in North America. At the same time, growing demand for trucks and SUVs, decreasing interest in cars and growing prevalence of alternative powertrains came to a head in 2018, driving fundamental automaker changes to production plans and product lines that will be felt in 2019 and for decades to come.

These trends, in turn, demand a strategic response from dealers that want to ensure sustainability and profitability in 2019 and beyond. With sales down, margins squeezed, products changing and consumers evolving, “business as usual” risks no longer delivering the usual results in 2019.

For the “Year of Demand” in 2019, consider responding with efficiency, adaptation and experience:

Efficiency

While efficiency is a dealer’s friend in the best of times, it’s during tightening markets where it truly becomes a critical competency. Too many dealers mistake cutting costs for efficiency, especially when they’re trying to do the same thing the same way while spending less.

Take customer acquisition, which is the lifeblood of any dealership. Marketing costs are a constant source of irritation and pain for dealers, especially in the traditional “spray and pray” model that often defies trustworthy ROI calculations. It’s tempting for dealers to shave their marketing spend, reducing frequency or thinning out channels to save a few dollars month-to-month and improve their bottom line in the short term.

With the same number of competitors chasing fewer customers, this is exactly the wrong way to go about finding efficiencies in marketing and reducing acquisition costs. You’re not changing the fundamental number that drives profitability, which is your advertising cost-per-sale. Dealers are used to hearing all sorts of sales pitches about the value various marketing campaigns will bring their business. But predictive marketing like the kind Mastermind offers is an entirely different model, with the results to show for it.

For instance, the industry average advertising cost-per-sale is $632. For Mastermind users, it’s $128. That’s efficiency through reinvention, enabling a much higher return on your marketing dollar and not just by spending less money to do the same thing.

Creating this kind of efficiency in a highly-competitive and mature market requires true reinvention of the marketing process, using the kinds of digital analytics tools that are reinventing so many other industries. These are the kinds of technologies that drove the e-commerce boom, that are reinventing everything from insurance to tourism, from Wall Street to law enforcement.

This reinvention means a paradigm shift from marketing to demographics or channels, to a one-to-one, personalized and predictive model that gets the consumer thinking about buying a new car before they even realize they are in the market.

Adaptation

2019 isn’t going to be a business-as-usual year, and dealers will have to adapt to both customers and manufacturers going through deep transformations.

It’s a cliché that it’s hard to see the forest for the trees, and dealers who are focused on their day-to-day business – especially during a tightening sales market – risk looking up to discover that they missed both threats and opportunities along the path they were on. Are your customers still interested in what you have to sell them? Are you sure? How do you know? Are there new customers who might be more interested in what’s on your showroom floor now than had been in the past?

This kind of environment is where predictive analytics shines, as the technologies behind it aren’t static or locked into a snapshot of the past. They’re constantly learning, by their very nature. With their ability to juggle thousands of data points at a time, they factor in the behavior not only of the customers who show up, but just as critically, they learn from those who don’t and automatically identify what didn’t work and what could be done better for the next similar customer.

This automated adaptation, which constantly refines your dealership’s understanding of both its existing and potential customers, can form the solid foundation for dealership success in 2019 and beyond. If your environment is evolving, so must you.

Customer Experience

It’s long been a fundamental truth of the auto dealer business that it’s much cheaper to sell another car to an existing customer than it is to conquest a new one. With fewer consumers on the horizon for 2019, it’s time to invest in your customer experience (CX) to ensure you’re building and maintaining the relationships upon which your success will depend in this brave new automotive world.

With sales down, it might seem counterintuitive to talk about investing in CX. But with its importance to your bottom line, it’s an undeniable fact that being good at keeping customers happy and feeling valued is far less expensive than being bad at it. Given the difference in acquisition costs between existing and conquest sales, every customer who walks out your door never to be seen again is hundreds or thousands of dollars in profit erased from your future balance sheets.

As we’ve discussed before, there are simple things that a dealership can do to improve CX and increase loyalty; this can be a starting point in 2019 for a more comprehensive approach such as Amazon’s “obsession with the customer” that leads to meeting customers’ needs before the customer even realizes they have them.

Whatever your specific strategy for improving the total experience your customers have with your dealership might be, its foundation needs to be a great CRM system that gives empowered employees the right data to do the right thing at the right time.

Demand Excellence

If 2019 is going to be the “Year of Demand” for dealerships, let it be the year that you demand excellence in marketing efficiency, in your adaptation to a changing marketplace and in your relationship with your customers. If you’re successful in these initiatives, then 2019 will truly be a happy new year.

Interested in learning how you can capitalize on demand this year? Sign up for a VIP demo today: https://automotivemastermind.com/#/demo

When the Internet first began to play a role in car buying, many dealers were concerned they would lose influence over their customers and become simply a pick-up location for new vehicle purchases – or worse. But while the dealership’s role has evolved thanks to modern technologies, those same changes are giving dealers more opportunities than ever before to become proactive rather than reactive in their relationship with their customers.

Many of the same core technologies that allow almost 90 percent of American consumers to research cars online before visiting a dealership also power predictive marketing solutions that can put dealers in the position to reach consumers with personalized and targeted communications at the time when they’re in the market for a new vehicle. Critically, this can happen even if the customer doesn’t realize that yet.

These predictive marketing solutions are an entry point to a comprehensive customer experience (often referred to as “CX”) model that draws customers in, learns as much as they can about them and then uses those insights to build a lasting, long-term relationship with them.

Forrester defines CX as how customers perceive their interactions with your company. For a customer to have a positive experience, Forrester says, you need to make it useful, usable and enjoyable.

Here, it’s worth considering the difference between “useful” and “usable” and how that applies to the dealership experience.

A useful experience is one that provides value to the customer. Almost 90 percent of consumers use the Internet to shop for cars, but less than a third of them show up at a dealership knowing which vehicle they’re going to buy. A useful experience is one where they’re given the information and insight they need and the hands-on product interactions they want, so they have everything they need to make a decision. For today’s shoppers, this means moving away from the sales pitch where you’re telling them what they already know from their research, and more toward a consultative “product expert” model where you’re determining where you can contribute to their understanding.

This changes from customer to customer. Baby boomers and Gen Xers may be more likely to arrive with questions to ask, but younger customers tend to want a quick path to a test drive. Either rushing or slowing down a customer’s preferred speed can harm their perception of their experience with you.

Where usefulness is about the value you provide your customers, usability is about how easy it is to do business with your dealership. This starts with your website. Most web traffic is mobile, and your site should be designed with this in mind – and continues throughout the entire CX process. Does your sales team know who your customers are and what they want before they show up? Is their car ready for a test drive when they get there? Is there a place for the kids to play while the adults talk? Are your employees trained, prepared and able to give your customers a personalized experience?

Everybody wants to feel special, and customers want to feel valued. This shows up in research on how they interact with companies: According to Marketo, more than 78% of consumers will only engage with offers if they have been personalized based on their prior engagements with you. More than half of customers are more likely to buy from you when they’re recognized by name.

Your customers will enjoy the car buying process more when you use predictive marketing to treat them as individuals with specific needs you can meet and expectations you can match. This commitment to CX then forms the basis of an ongoing relationship marketing function that crosses sales, service and finance to build lasting positive relationships with customers.

Done right, predictive marketing gets customers in the door, empowers you to personalize their experience and forms the basis for a profitable, long-term relationship. The alternative is a model of low-closing percentage digital sales teams, price-shopping walk-ins and “spray and pray” marketing campaigns. When you plan for the future of your dealership, you can either decide that you’re going to know what your customer wants and needs – maybe even before they do – or you can continue hoping for the best when someone walks in the door.

How Can automotiveMastermind Help?

Do you have any questions or comments about predictive solutions and how it’s changing the customer experience process? Contact us today.

While it might feel like we’re at the end of 2018 with a month and a half left in the year, another way to look at it is that we’ve still got a tenth of the calendar left in front of us. Just as you can get a lot done in the last 45 minutes to an hour of your work day, there’s still a lot that can be done to improve your dealership customer experience before closing the books on 2018. Here’s five suggestions on how to spend the remaining weeks:

1. Ask Your Customers for Anything but Time

French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte famously told his generals, “You can ask me for anything you like, except time.” It’s a sign of progress that your customers today feel the same way an emperor did in the 19th century, which is why one of the quickest ways to lose their business is to make them think you’re wasting their time.

Take time yourself to follow customers through both the sales and service customer experiences and identify where you could shave time, even a few seconds here or there. How long is the customer waiting while information is entered or retrieved from a system? How long do they wait to interact with a cashier or service representative? How long are they waiting for information to get from one of your employees to the next, or for their vehicle to be pulled around?

Survey after survey finds convenience is king for today’s customer – especially the next generation you’re hoping to build a relationship with now for decades to come. Find ways to make the entire process as short and efficient as possible, and then make a point of telling your customers what you’re doing. Don’t wait for them to notice that you’re finding little ways to make things move faster, but rather train your staff to share that information: “We’re doing things this way now because it lets me get you out of here faster.”

The more your customers believe you’re making a sincere effort not to waste their time, the more they’re going to be willing to entrust you with it in the future. A reputation for respecting your customers’ time is a powerful relationship marketing tool to drive future sales.

2. Who’s Waiting, and What Could They Be Doing?

Rethink your service waiting area. You’ve probably already figured out chargers and easy-to-access Wi-Fi are the new “doughnuts and free coffee,” but what’s next? These rooms tend to try to be something for everyone, but in the process, they can fail to meet the specific needs of your working customers. For someone who’s had to take unexpected time away from the office to deal with a car repair issue, it can be frustrating to try to stay connected to work while young children chatter, and game shows play on the television. Consider creating an adults-only service waiting area targeted at businesspeople, with minimal noise distractions, seating conducive to laptop use and potentially even a printer or fax machine.

Take a look at the next hotel “business center” you pass and consider what value its amenities might provide to your service customers. This is also a great time to make customers feel like they’re valued: Have a dealership manager take the opportunity to ask them in person what they thought of their wait, and what would have made it better: “We’re thinking of making some changes and would value your opinion.”

3. Revisit the Rules

Are your CRM rules still reflecting the way you want your customers cared for? Too many dealerships “set and forget” their CRM rules, and too few get dealership leaders in sales, service and F&I together to go through the rules together and ensure they reflect reality and best practices.

Your CRM is a critical engine for dealership sales – and, given the low cost of retaining an existing customer compared to the cost of acquiring a new one – profitability. Take the time before the end of the year to revisit those CRM rules about who gets contact, how often, for what and by whom, and make sure that they’re leveraging your CRM investment to its maximum potential.

4. Spread the Social Love

Keep your team connected to the digital world. While social media platforms are great for sharing special offers, news and other information with customers, they’re also a source of potential friction if your customer-facing staff don’t know what’s being said.

Do you have a process for making sure your sales and service teams know what’s being said on your social media channels and website? Do they all know what digital coupons are out there, or what vehicles are being featured today?

You can’t trust your team to be constantly watching Twitter – and you probably wouldn’t want them to, anyway. But with today’s customers virtually always starting their shopping online, it’s critical for dealerships to connect the (often offsite) digital team with the people who will be the next point of contact for those customers, ensuring there’s no confusion about the featured deal or coupon of the day.

5. Use the Free Time

We’re entering the slower period for foot traffic in the dealership, so this is a great time to get things done. Use this time for sales and service staff training, getting them up to speed on new tools as well as refreshing the things you let slide during the busier times. You don’t need to send people off to all-day seminars – although if you’re going to this is the right time – but you’ve got more time now for the kind of 15-minute or half-hour sessions that make a real difference in the long term. Whether it’s sales techniques, product knowledge, upsell opportunities, market information, internal policies or other useful knowledge, take advantage of the opportunity to make your team more efficient and effective.

If you’ve got maintenance or renovations to do to customer-facing areas that could be disruptive, this is the best time to get that done with the least possible interruption or inconvenience. Carpet a little worn in the service waiting area? Time to repaint the walls in the service bay? Need to reconfigure the sales team’s desks to make more room? November and December are the right time to get that done.

How Can automotiveMastermind Help?

With a number of tools out there to help you maximize your customer experience, the automotiveMastermind technology will help give you a major advantage over the competition. Nearly 70 percent of our dealer partners said they were at least 50 percent more productive after implementation. More than 70 percent said conversations with customers have also improved.

Contact us today to learn how we can help you improve your overall customer experience.