According to research by PwC, 73% of customers point to customer experience as an important factor in their purchasing decisions, with 65% noting a positive experience is more influential than great advertising.

But offering a positive experience isn’t as simple as it used to be.

Customers are interacting with your dealership beyond the facility and at all hours of the day. Customers are experiencing your dealership everywhere. And to stay ahead of that shift, many dealers are embracing data-driven strategies and technologies like CRMs to personalize the customer experience.

CRMs provide a massive amount of data. Today’s challenge for dealerships is not a lack of data, but rather, knowing how to act on it. 

So how are you supposed to maximize a CRM? How can your dealership use its data to improve the customer experience?

Let’s cover the importance of CRM platforms and then lay out a few tactics you can immediately deploy.

Why do dealerships need a CRM?

Dealerships need CRMs to manage customer communications and be more proactive in their operations.

We’ll expand on this concept later, but data from CRMs can shed important insights about customers that, in turn, help you improve their experience.

Take engagement rates for different communication channels as an example. CRMs tell your dealership how customers prefer to be communicated with by simply looking at which types of messages they open, read, and respond to.

In a similar way, data from your CRM can help you predict which services a customer will need and when they will need them. Not only does this create a better, frictionless customer experience, but it’s also better for your business. And that’s the overarching highlight of CRMs – what’s better for your customers is usually better for your business.

Getting the Most from Your CRM

Maximizing your dealership’s use of a CRM comes down to being proactive. You should always be thinking one step ahead in the customer journey and using your data to personalize the customer experience.

As we’ve mentioned, even loyal customers are likely to leave after a bad experience. So, the more proactive opportunities you can identify in their journey, the better.

Let’s look at an example. When a customer who leases a vehicle through your dealership visits for a service – and their lease ends soon – a strong CRM will flag that information for the user. In this case, your team would know their lease ends soon and use that information to personalize the customer experience.

Instead of letting them go through with the service and then returning a few months later to end their lease, what if you could take care of the customer now? Whether it’s selling them a car, finding them a new lease, or just providing more information about ending the lease, this type of proactive customer service is better for customers and your business.

The other important factor to mention when it comes to CRMs is communications. Getting the most out of your CRM means improving how your dealership communicates. Due to their structure, many dealerships would have asynchronous communications without CRMs. But when dealerships embrace their CRM, they can synchronize communications for customers and team members.

For example, if a customer needs to be given a complete report of their service appointment, that can be created within (and delivered from) a dealership’s CRM. It also gives the customer a direct line to respond to communications. And when team members need to communicate between each other about a customer, those notes can be exchanged on the customer’s profile within the CRM.

The real value here is centralizing information. When you maximize your CRM, you’re not relying on verbal communications to get key points across. And all communications are generally stored in a centralized location for easy reference.

Doing More with Data at DriveSure

In our mission to help dealerships become the only place your customers depend on for maintenance, tires, and repairs, we are constantly thinking about how to best use data to personalize the customer experience at DriveSure. It’s a big deal to strive for this, but it doesn’t have to be complex. With most of the data you need already at your fingertips, it’s typically a matter of acting on it. Here are some ways DriveSure does that:

· Connecting email and retention: DriveSure measures each dealership’s email collection rate and then 12-month customer retention for customers, segmented by whether the customer’s email address is on file or not. From that, we compare retention rates against those email collection rates. In this example, we see a huge connection between retention and email collection, which tells us dealerships need to focus on increasing their email collection to improve retention.

· Personalizing customer engagement: People don’t respond to most marketing messages because far too many of those messages aren’t focused on being helpful to them. DriveSure gives you a spam-free way to reach your customers exactly when they need you, in a personalized way, and through the method they prefer based on data that’s been collected.

· Sending reminders and notifications: One of the core ways to leverage DriveSure is to send proactive communications based on customer events like service reminders or upcoming benefit expirations. DriveSure enables dealerships to proactively contact customers in a personalized way – addressing their specific needs based on data.

· Centralizing information for customers in a personalized portal: An upcoming feature by DriveSure will allow your customers to scan a QR code on their windshield sticker to access their personalized DriveSure benefits portal. This portal will contain all their DriveSure benefits information as well as simple ways to request roadside assistance or navigate to the dealership’s webpage for scheduling service.

Building a Data-Driven Culture

The highest-performing service advisors we know proactively use their CRM.

They look at their customers coming in tomorrow, review their notes from last time, and strive to personalize their experience.

How many miles is the customer approaching? Did they ask a question last visit that we never answered?

This is the level of detail and care it requires to maximize your CRM. And this is how dealerships can use data to shape their culture, customer experience, and overall business results.

Interested in learning more about how to optimize the customer journey? Check out our guide, Avoiding Potholes in the Customer Journey, to discover the five critical moments you need to plan around.

Dealerships today are focused on digital marketing more and more. The world gets more digital every day, so the online attention makes sense. You always want to “skate to where the puck is going,” but what happens when all your competition is already there?

That’s when diversifying your strategies makes sense, even if it means pulling out an old playbook and sprucing it up a bit. The playbook we’re pulling out in this instance is direct marketing.

Direct marketing generally includes any direct communication to customers that doesn’t rely on third-party media advertising channels. You will find digital strategies included in the concept of direct marketing, and those are important to help you stay ahead of the game. But often when our industry talks about “direct marketing,” we’re still referring to highly targeted print mail.

At DriveSure, we make it easy for new car dealerships to offer unbeatable maintenance and bring customers back for service, tires, and unplanned repairs. So, the examples we’ll explore below are focused on firsthand experience increasing benefit package awareness and activation. But it’s important to note these direct mail tactics can be applied to many other areas of your dealership.

4 Direct Mail Tactics That Work

1. Make sure your offer stands out.

Most of us take action as customers when it’s obvious there’s value we couldn’t otherwise receive. Your dealership’s customers behave the same way. Their mailboxes are full of the same old “junk mail." To stand out, you need a message that promises unique and compelling value. 

Our minds tend to jump to things like discounts and coupons when we talk about grabbing customers’ attention. While that strategy can work, it has profit-eating downsides too. Plus, it’s what everyone else is doing.

Instead of simply mailing out a bunch of mailers with discounts or promotions, consider using a mix of personalization and differentiation.

For example, the direct mail we send out for dealerships that offer DriveSure are timed based on when the customer is due for service. The mailers also pack a 1-2 punch of value. Not only do they often include a coupon or two for service offerings, they highlight the suite of DriveSure benefits (renewable roadside assistance, tire protection, and alternate transportation coverage) that’ll be included with the service at no extra charge.

2. Repeat and remind customers of conversations from the dealership.

Direct mail is a great reminder channel for customers and prospects. New car buyers are the perfect example of who can benefit from direct mail reminders.

Buying a new car can be exhausting no matter how polished your processes are. Buyers may be worried about negotiating the price, anxious about making a big purchase, and overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information they’re getting. Plus, all they’re really thinking about is getting behind the wheel of their new car.

If there’s a particular piece of information you want to make sure they understand and remember, it’s a good idea to send a reinforcing message later. A simple thank-you for their purchase along with a quick recap of what you discussed can make all the difference. This is especially true for information that’ll keep them coming back to you for service and future purchases.

3. Send print mail to customers without an email address on file.

Without a doubt, it’s always a good idea to collect email addresses from your customers – a solid benchmark is to have 75% of your customers’ email addresses.

But how do you reach the other 25%? 

Email is our primary channel for DriveSure benefit reminders so this is a question we’ve had to address ourselves. Personalized print mail has been a great backup for the dealerships we work with. This combination of email (and text messaging) and direct mail ensures you reach all of your customers through the best channel for them. 

4. Use your database to drive retention and revenue pushes.

Whether it’s sales or service, sometimes you need a revenue push to meet or exceed monthly, quarterly, or annual objectives. The best way get sales quick is to turn to the people who already know who you are. 

Here’s a direct mail example we call Traffic Driver campaigns. First, we work with dealerships to pull a list of customers from their database who haven’t visited the dealership in, for example, nine months. Then, we send a direct mailer to these customers – usually with an offer to reactivate their DriveSure benefits or to announce the introduction of DriveSure benefits if it’s a new initiative for the dealership. It’s that simple, but effective.

To see a strategy like this in action, check out how Mazda of Orland Park used DriveSure direct mail to help generate a 6x return-on-investment in this case study.

The Goal of Dealership Direct Marketing

As we’ve covered before, digital marketing strategies do work. Channels such as text messaging, mobile alerts, and email are all effective because most customers spend time on those channels already. But it would be a mistake to abandon direct mail.

There are many tactics to consider for business development and customer retention. The question is: which ones are right for your current situation and needs? Pay attention to market trends and how things are changing, but don’t lose sight of the ultimate goal – business growth.

It seems obvious: Customers tell you what they like or don’t like. Your dealership does more or less of those things. At a basic level, that’s right. But dealerships need more intentionality when it comes to customer feedback. They need to be able to take action and show their customers they’re committed to continual improvement and listening.

That’s where customer feedback loops enter the picture.

A customer feedback loop is an approach to gathering insights on a continual basis, so your dealership can keep its finger on the pulse of your customer base and improve its overall experience. Many dealerships send surveys or have casual conversations with their customers. Customer feedback loops take these efforts to the next level to ensure you’re constantly receiving and responding to customer feedback.

As we’ll talk about later, the key point for a successful customer feedback loop is “responding.” Without meaningful action from your dealership – aka closing the loop – it fails to be a feedback loop at all.

Let’s take a closer look at customer feedback loops and why your dealership should have one. 

The Importance of a Customer Feedback Loop

Customer feedback loops drive loyalty and retention. Customers want to know they have a voice at your dealership and that you’re willing to listen to them. Show them you’re all about taking action to improve their experience and they’ll keep coming back. They’ll also tell their friends and family to buy from your dealership.

“Customer feedback is the breakfast of champions.” - Brian Halligan, co-founder of HubSpot & renowned business leader

Customer feedback loops are important to dealerships because they establish a scalable system for making customers feel heard. They go beyond merely asking for feedback; customer feedback loops end with a solution and an affirmation to the customer that their thoughts led to a positive change.

Customer feedback loops are essential because customer loyalty is essential. Their value is that simple.

The Stages of a Customer Feedback Loop

1. Gather: Surveys are a natural starting point for gathering data. Using a survey platform to do this can be beneficial because they’re easy to build and share – and they sometimes offer instant analysis of the results. Gathering feedback can be done via email, dealer management systems, live chats, and even social media.

Understanding when to source customer feedback is the key at this stage.

Think about the different touchpoints where a customer is most likely to have an emotional response (good or bad) to your dealership. At what points in their visit are customers deciding to buy or not? At what points are they deciding they’ll return or not?

An example strategy for gathering data in a customer feedback loop may begin with a survey about a service visit. You set up an automation, likely using an email integration with your dealer management system, to send each service customer a satisfaction survey one hour after their visit. Once the customer completes the survey, another automated email is sent to them as a “thank you” for their time – potentially including a small dealership store credit.

While this outreach can be done manually, it’s a huge challenge to scale. Just like with requesting customer reviews, automated email campaigns are effective and easy to create.

2. Analyze: Once you’ve gathered enough data to make reasonable conclusions about your customer satisfaction, it’s time to analyze. Your dealership may also consider setting up a quarterly cadence for performing these analyses. First, break out your customer feedback by category – for example, service insights vs. sales insights. Then, your dealership can review feedback in an intentional and actionable way.

Hopefully the tools you’re using have built-in analytics. Either way, you’re looking for common themes here. Are you receiving the same complaints about service wait times? Do customers rave about the same salesperson? These are the kinds of questions you’ll ask yourself as you analyze customer feedback.

3. Implement: As mentioned earlier, this fails to be a “loop” without action from your dealership. That means implementing insights from your customer feedback – or closing the loop – through solutions. If you’ve determined a need, such as decreasing service wait times, start working towards a strategy with your team.

An important point at this stage is to communicate with your customers. Set the tone that your dealership is dedicated to their satisfaction by letting them know a solution is in the works as a result of their feedback. Once the solution has been implemented, again make sure customers know that it was a result of their feedback.

Action and communication fuel customer feedback loops (and thus loyalty).

4. Revisit: Without customer feedback loops, old problems can quickly become new problems. In the analyze stage, watch out for common customer complaints that have returned. Track the performance and reception of new solutions. Ask your customers in the gather stage for their thoughts on the solutions you’ve already implemented as a result of their feedback. As the name suggests, customer feedback loops depend on constant connection throughout the stages.

Closing a Customer Feedback Loop

The benefits and stages of a customer feedback loop are all well-documented. But as you read more about this topic, you’ll run into the idea of “closing” your customer feedback loop.

Wait, why would you want to close your customer feedback loop?

Closing the customer feedback loop simply means you’ve notified customers a change has been made to your dealership’s offerings directly based on their feedback. Going back to the main theme of customer feedback loops, you’re putting a cap on the process by telling them they were heard. You’re telling them their feedback mattered.

Ready to kickstart and close your customer feedback loop?

Get this guide to the customer journey first, so your dealership can better understand the most common moments dealerships lose customers. These are great places to start focusing on feedback.

Let’s be honest, the car buying experience right now isn’t great for most buyers. Vehicles cost more (if people can even find one), and some buyers are waiting months for delivery. With the inventory shortage creating such negative impacts on customer experience, it’s more critical than ever for dealerships to focus on the things they can control to delight as many customers as possible.

While dealership profitability is higher now than in previous years, there’s no guarantee this windfall will last. Things will return to some version of “normal” eventually. The dealerships that’ll be most successful over the long term are the ones that take action now to make customers happy and ensure they keep coming back.

It’s time to play the long game and think about our customers now as our customers forever. Let’s explore how.

Set the stage for a return customer from day one.

As we say at DriveSure, the service experience starts with the sale. But dealerships should zoom out and look at the big picture of how sales and service are connected. As your number of service customers increases, so does your number of future vehicle buyers—not to mention all the revenue you’ll earn on return service visits in the meantime.

That’s why getting buyers to return for service is so important to preserving your high profitability. Customer satisfaction is largely driven by a feeling of comfort and removing friction. Keep it simple for vehicle buyers and make a low-pressure introduction to the service team. Grab a free copy of our sales-to-service handoff checklist for more guidance.

Train your team to delight every customer.

Employee training is key to the success of any dealership department. And in the current market, every team member needs to be sharp and understand how their roles fit into the bigger picture. The list of training areas for a dealership is endless, but the focus point right now should be on boosting customer satisfaction.

They are experiencing it firsthand, but make sure every employee has a strong grasp on the inventory shortage and other market realities. Talk about how this impacts the customer experience and consider creating some talking points for sales and service team members (like you would for a mock sales conversation). Over time, training your team to delight every customer will pay dividends when it comes to dealership customer retention.

Get good at selling without the test drive.

For as long salespeople have been selling vehicles, they’ve relied heavily on letting customers see and experience the vehicle a buyer may be interested in. Few things are as powerful as letting a customer sit in a new drivers’ seat, smell that new-car small, play with the latest auto tech, and feel the rush of accelerating on a test drive. But with so many lots empty, all that is quickly becoming replaced with showing a customer a vehicle on a computer screen. And with new entrants like Tesla exploring direct-to-consumer models and even Ford moving toward more build-to-order sales, this way of selling may remain popular even after supply catches up with demand.

While this change is a drastic one, it’s still early days. Figure out how to make your team great at selling without the vehicle in front of them. Explore new ways to get buyers excited and experiment with how your dealership can offer value beyond what a customer could do at home on a manufacturer’s website. Adapting to this change won’t be easy, but the future of your dealership may end up depending on whether you invest time and resources into embracing it as early as possible.

Prioritize customer loyalty.

There are many ways to build customer loyalty, including some tactics I’ve already mentioned in this article. During this inventory shortage especially, small details can make a big difference. Here are a few ideas to consider:

• Engage your customers on social media: In addition to regular content creation and posts, look at fun and light ways to keep people thinking about your dealership. This could be a funny video featuring employees or even an audience challenge where the winner gets a prize from the dealership.
• Provide special offers to your loyal customers: Show your most frequent customers your dealership appreciates them by offering discounts in your online store, service specials, free vehicle detailing, or even special gift packages.
• Send your customers cards on special occasions: Like I said, it’s the little things that make a big difference. Set up a system (to the extent it’s possible) for making sure your most frequent customers get birthday cards and holiday cards.
• Offer incentives with DriveSure: Building customer loyalty is where DriveSure shines – offering a suite of renewable benefits like road hazard tire protection, renewable roadside assistance, and emergency alternate transportation at no cost to your customers for the length of the service interval. With DriveSure, the customer just has to come back to the dealership for service or repairs to renew their perks. It’s never been easier to delight your customers and give them new reasons to return.

The key to keeping customers coming back despite bumps in the road is knowing where they are and how to get out ahead of them. Read our guide on avoiding potholes in the customer journey to learn more.

How to Keep Your Team Sharp & Satisfied

The average tenure for dealership employees in the United States is under two years.

It’s a huge challenge to grow a dealership if your average tenure is near that. Turnover costs your business valuable time, performance, and money. And it’s all connected.

The benefits of employee training are clear. When you invest in training your employees, they feel like valued members of the team and even perform better. What does a sharp and satisfied team mean for the dealership? A stronger bottom line.

We know the best ways to attract and retain top talent are to have a strong culture, clear (and promising) career paths, and effective leadership. With those big picture concepts in mind, let’s look at some specific ways you can keep your team sharp and satisfied.

Employee Training Tips: How to Keep Your Team Sharp & Satisfied

#1 Offer Platform-Specific Onboarding & Training

#2 Train for the Soft Skills

#3 Host Internal Workshops Led by Team Members

#4 Create Your Own Certification Program

#5 Give Access to Online Learning Programs

Offer Platform-Specific Onboarding & Training

Whether it’s a DMS or one of the many tools used by your service techs, sometimes new technology costs more time than they free up. Having appropriate team members consistently trained on these tools can save your dealership considerable time and money. Not only will they work faster, but they will be less likely to spend time on troubleshooting and ultimately make fewer mistakes in the system or with the tool.

Most software companies offer onboarding (aka implementation) for the main users. Often you can pay a separate fee to get that same training for other members of the team. If you want to avoid additional platform fees – and your dealership doesn’t have an IT Manager – consider making an employee your “platform expert” who can conduct trainings in-house. Beyond software, make sure your dealership has an employee handbook with documented instructions for every platform and tool. And if you have that, make sure someone on your staff is in charge of keeping it updated as instructions change and tools get added.

Train for the Soft Skills

We know from our research that few things are more important for your dealership’s success than a great customer experience. Even loyal customers have little patience for a bad experience, while an outstanding experience can go a long way towards improving your retention.

That’s why training for people skills is so important. Make sure you’re regularly role playing with customer-facing employees and take action on your customer reviews, both positive and negative. They’ll often point you to the behaviors you should reward as well as the ones you’ll need to coach.

Host Internal Workshops Led by Team Members

The best way to learn is to teach.

Another great training method that also builds team morale is internal workshops. With these, your dealership has a calendar of weekly or monthly meetings where a team member (or small group) trains their peers on a certain topic or tool.

Internal workshops led by team members work because they force the teachers to master a topic or tool. They also work because the training is being delivered by a peer, a team member everyone can align themselves with. Keep it light and make it fun! Consider ordering food and drinks for the team members since this may be outside of their normal working hours.

Create Your Own Certification Program

“Certification program” doesn’t mean your employees get a plaque; don’t get carried away with this one. We’re simply referring to a formal training checklist. Think about each job description on your team, and then create a list of imperatives your employees must learn and develop.

By reframing your different jobs as a certification program, you “gamify” the employee experience at your dealership. Instead of just waiting for a promotion (or leaving), employees can see exactly what they need to learn in order to advance. This will both sharpen your team’s skills and promote employee retention.

Give Your Team Access to Online Learning Programs

Online learning programs for dealerships like DrivingSales span far and wide. Once you choose a program you like the best, think about what your team needs to learn and how they will get individual access. From handling sales objections to industry compliance standards, there are many areas your team can learn more about through an online program.

Here are some of the main areas to focus on when searching for and designing your team’s online learning program:

• Customer communications
• Dealership operations
• Compliance awareness
• Conversational sales tactics
• General management concepts

Paying for your team’s access to an online learning program shows how much your dealership values professional development, and it will pay dividends over time as your employees learn and grow.

What will your team learn next?

It’s a commonly known, quoted, and understood fact that it’s at least 5 times more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to keep an existing one.

Based on that statistic, it’s no wonder so many organizations (and dealerships) make customer retention a major strategy for improving overall revenue and profit. But what happens if, despite your best efforts, your customers just aren’t coming back? Without direct insight into your customers’ minds, it can feel like you’re fighting an uphill battle…and losing.

In our 2020 Dealership Service Retention Report, we explored exactly why (even loyal) customers don’t come back to your dealership and in this article we’ll highlight the top five reasons you could be losing your best customers and how to change that.

Top 5 Reasons Your Customers Aren’t Coming Back…

Whether it’s a bad first impression or a high price tag, these five reasons could spell disaster for customer loyalty and revenue.

1. A Previous Bad Experience

Nothing makes a customer walk away faster than a bad experience. Don’t believe us? According to PWC, “32% of all customers would stop doing business with a brand they loved after one bad experience.” That doesn’t leave much wiggle room.

And in the world of social media and Yelp reviews, that lost customer can cost you quite a bit. But bad experiences aren’t just limited to a customer thinking a service representative was rude. In fact, it can include:

• Having to repeat an issue to multiple people within the department
• Sticker shock, especially for the first visit after their warranty expires
• Feeling pressured into additional (potentially costly) services

…And Strategies to Change that

Customer experience isn’t just a skill for your service advisors, everyone on your team needs to be equipped to provide your customers with top-notch service. If you find yourself losing customers to bad experiences think about implementing a customer feedback loop to allow your team members to receive valuable customer insight or provide yearly training on customer service techniques.

2. Lower Prices at Other Service Centers

Sometimes it really is about the dollars and cents. And for many that can be a difficult problem to overcome. However, it’s important to note that discounts and deals don’t always equate to loyalty, so don’t jump to offer a lower price quite yet!

…And Strategies to Change that

Instead of focusing on cost, focus on value. Competing solely on price point is a losing battle, but providing customers with additional value with their service will keep them coming back again and again.

An easy way to do that? Partnering with a renewable benefits provider like DriveSure means your customer’s oil change now comes backed by roadside assistance, tire hazard protection, and emergency alternate transportation. An oil change will never look the same again!

3. The Services Needed are Minor

Small repairs or maintenance can be a gold mine for your service department, but only if your customers bring their cars to you. And when the repair is small enough for a relative, friend, or local shop to do, customers might be less inclined to bring you their business.

…And Strategies to Change that

Sometimes it really is as easy as improving awareness of your services. Make sure your customers know your service department can help with all kinds of maintenance and repairs…from the small to the extensive.

Bonus: This can be especially true when it comes to tires. According to that same Retention Report, over 20% of customers didn’t know if their dealership offered tire repairs or not. Don’t lose out on tire customers just because your service isn’t well advertised. Talk it up and gain some traction with your tire sales.

4. A More Convenient Location

In today’s world of overnight shipping and hour or less delivery, convenience is a big factor in customer loyalty.

…And Strategies to Change that

Unfortunately, you can’t up and move your service department to make it more accessible for every customer. What you can do is advertise using local SEO so nearby customers know where to go when they are in need of a repair.

Bonus: Providing customers with dealer-loyal roadside assistance means when or if they experience an unplanned repair, their cars go to your dealership and not the repair shop down the street.

5. A Referral or Recommendation from a Friend

Customers trust other customers. If a friend is recommending a different service department, even a loyal customer of yours may be willing to try them out.

…And Strategies to Change that

Loyal customers = more referrals for your business. By providing customers with a quality experience, better value for their money, and convenient access to repairs of any kind, you’ll be well on your way to developing a rolodex of referrals. To maximize this effect, make sure your happy customers are also encouraged to leave online reviews for your dealership too.

Don’t keep letting your customers just walk away. Implement these strategies and watch your customer retention and revenue skyrocket.

Service advisors are the bridge between your customers and your service department, bringing in new repair orders and new profits. Which means, if they aren’t measuring up, your service department likely isn’t either. 

Understanding exactly how to measure their success – and what you can do to improve it – will help your entire service department function more smoothly and (hopefully) at a higher profit margin.

In this article, we’ll break down the five key metrics you should be measuring and give you five pieces of advice to improve your service advisors’ performance across the board.

Key Service Advisor Metrics

Setting benchmarks will help you track who’s performing and who isn’t quite up to par. Ready, set, measure.

1.    Number of Repair Orders Per Advisor vs. Quoted Repairs

A simple but effective metric. Tracking how many repair orders your service advisors are writing every day vs. how many quotes they give to customers will tell you a few different things:

• How well your service advisors are able to convert quotes to real sales
• If your sales advisors are writing too many repair orders per day for your service department to keep up
• If your service advisors are writing too few repair orders, leaving profits on the table and your technicians standing around

2.    Hours Sold Per Repair Order

While not an advisor-only metric, this measurement can help identify if advisors are consistently discounting the price given to customers, cherry-picking orders/appointments, or otherwise mis-handling repair orders. While many measure this by simply dividing billed hours by repair orders, a more accurate measurement looks a little something like this:

3.    Point of Sale Add-Ons

Whether it’s a tire rotation or an oil change, your service advisors should be acting as salespeople AND customer advisors, recommending additional services that could benefit your customers. 

4.    Customer Satisfaction

As a customer-facing employee, it’s critical that your service advisors offer a great customer experience for every vehicle owner. If they are being too pushy or plain rude to customers, you face a substantial risk of a negative review about your service department ending up in the social sphere.

Bonus: Working with a renewable benefits provider like DriveSure makes it easy for your service advisors to surprise and delight customers. Suddenly that simple oil change now comes with the peace of mind of 24/7 roadside assistance, road hazard tire protection, and emergency alternate transportation.

5.    Customer Retention

Even if your customers are perfectly happy, they might end up going elsewhere for their vehicle maintenance. Customer retention has proven to have a direct impact on your bottom line, so if your advisors aren’t focused on retaining EVERY customer it could be time to retain new advisors.

Easy ways to measure how effective your advisors are at customer retention:

• Number of customers scheduled for their next visit before they leave the shop
• Number of reminder emails or texts sent to customers who haven’t scheduled an appointment
• (If using DriveSure or another incentive-based retention program) How clearly advisors communicate the renewable benefits that may come with regularly scheduled maintenance and the timeline for when those benefits expire

Improving Service Advisor Effectiveness

Now that you’ve set a baseline for performance, it’s time to see how your service advisors can improve on their metrics and their overall contribution to your service department.

1.    Continuous Training

Don’t let that first week be the last time your service advisors experience any kind of training. Whether it’s to help improve their sales techniques or bring them up to speed on a new service your offering, your service advisors need to be equipped with the training to do their job…and do it right.

2.    Set Target Goals and Metrics

If you haven’t defined clear goals or quotas that your service advisors should be meeting, chances are they probably aren’t meeting them. Set new benchmarks based on past performance and opportunity for improvement.

3.    Create a Clear Pricing Structure and Rule for Discounts

Letting service advisors choose when and where to apply discounts based on their own discretion is a slippery slope to less profitability. Create pricing guidelines that your service advisors can follow as well as clear instructions for when and if a discount should be applied.

Not only will this make your service advisors lives just a little easier when they need to calculate customer cost, but it will ensure maximum profitability for your department.

4.    Define Service Department Capacity and Open Lines of Communication

If your service advisors and technicians are out of whack, it can spell disaster for the effectiveness and profitability of your department. Ensure all service advisors understand the max capacity per day of the department and that they have an open line of communication with the technicians should anything need to be adjusted.

5.    Implement a Customer Feedback Mechanism

Improving customer service skills can be tricky if your service advisors never have any feedback to work off of. A customer service or feedback mechanism can help your service advisors see where they misstepped so they can avoid it in the future. Options include:

• Recorded customer service calls
• Post service customer surveys

More than likely, your service advisors are one of the (if not only) main points of contact for your customers. Measuring and improving their performance means keeping your customers happy and your profits high.

So, ready to start your review?

You already know that marketing is a key component to selling and servicing more vehicles. But do you know just how well your marketing works for your dealership?

To get a clear answer to that question, you’ll need to know what to measure and how your metrics stack up. Only then can you really identify what’s performing well and what may need some adjustments.

Metrics to Measure

The specific metrics you use to gain insight into your marketing performance will depend on the strategy or strategies you’ve selected – if you aren’t running a social media campaign, social engagement metrics probably won’t offer you much.

With that in mind, we’ve gathered the top 8 metrics you should be measuring (as well as some benchmarks). So the next time someone asks, you’ll be able to say for certain that your car dealership marketing is running at peak performance.

1. Social Engagement Metrics

Social media offers a bevy of metrics to track and analyze, making it easy to know how well your campaign is performing. And while metrics like clicks, shares, comments, and likes won’t give you insight into how many new customers a social campaign ultimately generated, it does offer some great leading indicators to track.

A Good Benchmark: Thanks to Socialinsider, who published a comprehensive report on industry specific benchmarks, we have a clear picture of engagement rates across platforms.

Strategies to Improve: Social media is all about connecting, so if you aren’t seeing a ton of engagement on your own posts, try going out and engaging on others. Getting your name out in the industry will draw a crowd back to you and help to boost your metrics the next time around.

2. Email Metrics

Similar to social media, email marketing is a smorgasbord of measurement: delivers, opens, click-throughs. It’s metric utopia and will give you some critical insight into who exactly is seeing your marketing and any follow-up action they are taking.

A Good Benchmark: According to Campaign Monitor, a few of the average benchmarks (across industries) break down like this:

• Open: 18%*
• Click-Through: 2.6%
• Click-to-Open: 14.1%
• Unsubscribes: 0.1%

*Note that due to some changes in how Apple devices handle email, open rate benchmarks are likely to change significantly in the near future and may no longer be a reliable email metric to track.

Strategies to Improve: Not seeing the results you want, check out your email list. If you haven’t scrubbed your list recently – removing any outdated or inaccurate information – you could be setting yourself up for failure. Beyond that, let your metrics show you where to improve:

• Lagging open rates? Do some testing on your subject lines.
• Poor click-through or click-to-open rates? Make sure that the content in the email is valuable to the reader and that your calls to action are clear.
• High unsubscribe rate? Check if you’re adding people to your email lists who shouldn’t be added, ensure you aren’t sending too many emails, and be critical about whether your emails are truly valuable to your audience.

3. Search Rankings

Google search is a fiercely competitive landscape and ranking on the first page for a search term doesn’t just happen because you added some new content to your website. If you want to rank for your target keywords, you’re going to have to be diligent about creating the right kind of content that answers your target audiences search queries.

A Good Benchmark: While not an exact benchmark, a BrightEdge study found that organic search comprises 53% of all website traffic. Which means a great place to start measuring your SEO results is by measuring any increases in traffic and examining where that traffic is coming from using tools like Google Analytics.

Strategies to Improve: Beyond your keyword research, there are a couple of quick and easy tactics to optimize your content for improved SEO ranking:

• Be sure that your website is easy to navigate and loads quickly, especially on mobile devices
• Include descriptive H1, H2, and H3 headings with your keyword (but be careful not to simply repeat the keyword over and over again in your content)
• Always include alt text for images, graphs, charts, etc.
• Make sure your website’s content is accurate, valuable to the reader, and fully answers or addresses the search term or phrase you want to rank for

4. Cost Per Lead (CPL)

Investing in paid ads on platforms like Google and Facebook can be a great strategy for reaching new, targeted individuals – with the level of segmentation available, these ads are served directly to an audience most interested in the services your car dealership provides. However, paid ads can also be a colossal waste of money. Measuring your cost per lead (CPL) will help determine if the benefits (number of leads) really do outweigh the costs.

A Good Benchmark: Lion Tree Group found that the cost-per-lead for the auto industry fell just above $200.

Strategies to Improve: If you’re seeing a higher CPL than your comfortable with, it might be time to try optimizing your ads – switch out your imagery, change up your copy, or maybe try a new promotion altogether. Whatever it is, it could be your key to decreasing costs and increasing new leads.

5. Website Traffic (Total vs. Unique Visits)

The traffic to your website is a direct result of your marketing outreach strategies and will definitively tell you how many people are actually taking the action to click through to your site. But be careful, one person might visit your site multiple times and skew your report, so it’s important to measure both total visits and unique visits.

A Good Benchmark: Unfortunately there isn’t a solid benchmark for this metric because it will vary significantly from one dealer to the next based on the size of your dealership, the size of the area you serve, and many other factors. The best thing to do is measure your traffic and watch for changes over time, especially changes that coincide with changes to your marketing efforts.

Strategies to Improve: Website traffic is a good indicator of the overall effectiveness of your marketing strategies so there isn’t a single strategy for increasing it. However, if you’re struggling to grow website traffic despite a robust marketing strategy, be sure your URL is easy to remember and type, that you’re following basic SEO best practices, that you’ve claimed and updated your Google My Business listing, and that your dealership is listed in any relevant local business directories.

6. Website Conversion Rate

Your conversion rate is the number of prospects who converted into a new sale divided by the total number of visitors to your website. This should tell you how well your website acts as a marketing tool, driving new customers to your dealership.

A Good Benchmark: According to a ContentSquare report, the average conversion rate for the automotive industry is 0.4%.

Strategies to Improve: Converting leads to sales is the final push of any marketing effort, and arguably the most important. If your website isn’t performing, it can feel a little like fumbling the ball at the five-yard line.

How do you improve? Start A/B testing. Defining and testing how specific aspects of your site perform will help you determine exactly where the problem lies…without having to do a complete website overhaul.

7. Attrition/Retention

Customer loyalty and retention is one of your most valuable commodities and should be a main objective for any marketing initiative.

A Good Benchmark: Statista reports an average retention rate of 83% for the automotive and transportation industry.

Strategies to Improve: Partnering with a renewable benefits provider like DriveSure creates an incentive for customers to stay loyal to your shop and continue to come back for services – no matter how big or small. In fact, according to our most recent survey, 84% of respondents stated that DriveSure benefits make them more likely to return to their dealership for their next oil change.

8. Total Spend

And finally, the dollars and cents. How much have you spent in total? Did you exceed your budget? Were the results good enough to increase your budget for next quarter or next year?

What level of investment did you make and how would you rate your return?

A Good Benchmark: According to the NADA Data 2020 report, the average dealership spent $450,094 on advertising in 2020, or about .8% of their total sales.

Strategies to Improve: Spending too much and not seeing the kind of results you had hoped for? Audit your marketing strategy with a specific focus on channels and content.

• Channels: Cost can very drastically between channels, so it’s important to note if one channel is outperforming another.
• Content: Not every piece of content is right for every channel. Determine the type of content that channel’s audience finds more relevant and engaging and adjust from there.

Ready to see how well your marketing is working? Define your metrics and start measuring.

We help a lot of dealerships across the country attract and retain service customers, but many of our dealership partners are currently facing another challenge too: attracting and retaining quality auto technicians.

As the industry continues to experience a severe shortage of auto technicians, an issue which doesn’t appear to be going away any time soon according to a 2020 Tech Force report, service departments are faced with the seemingly insurmountable task of filling vacancies to serve vehicles.

In fact, according to that same report, “Although demand is strong, with 642,000 auto/diesel/collision techs needed between 2020 and 2024, the shortage continues to worsen.”

And while efficiency and scheduling have been proven to help service departments to some degree, the fact remains the same: we need more auto technicians.

How do you solve this seemingly impossible puzzle? While we may not have a crystal ball, we do have a few crystal-clear insights to help you find and hire your next auto tech.

10 Tactics to Finding and Hiring Technicians

Ready to start hiring? These 10 tactics will help you find, hire, and retain your top talent. Keeping your service bays filled, with cars and the technicians trained to service them.

Improving Recruitment and Awareness

First things first, if you want to hire the right people, the right people have to know you’re hiring. Getting the word out will drive demand for your job listings and broaden your candidate pool now and in the future.

1. Partner with Local Training Programs/Vocational Schools

The NADA Foundation has created a national repository of training programs and vocational schools for new technicians looking to enter the industry. Partner with the existing programs in your area to open the door for new technicians to find the right opportunity with your dealership.

2. Use the Job Boards

Indeed or Monster may be your first thought when you heard the words “Job Board” but don’t forget about industry-specific job boards as well. Posting your jobs there will ensure the right people are seeing your listings. Some automotive job boards include:

• Find a Wrench
• AutoJobs.com
• NeedTechs.com
• AutoServiceJobs.com
• AutoCare Careers

3. Host In-Person or Virtual Events

Recruiting events are a great way to engage a large number of potential hires. Make sure you are advertising your event with local training programs, through your social media, and on your website for the best turnout.

4. Leverage Your Technicians’ Networks

Chances are, your existing technicians know other technicians in the industry. Leverage their networks to get the word out that you’re hiring and find qualified individuals faster.

Bonus tip: Include a referral bonus for your existing technicians to incentivize your team and really get this program up and running.

5. Differentiate Your Service Department

Make it clear what differentiates your service department from others, whether it’s a stellar training program or an extremely loyal customer base. Highlighting the benefits and advantages of your service department will not only attract the kind of talented technicians you’re looking for but keep them around long term.

Creating the Right Employee Experience

The industry-wide technician shortage has given auto technicians the upper hand in the recruitment and hiring process – making employee experience a critical factor for technicians who are on the job hunt and even those who may seem happily employed. Get ahead of the curve and implement some of these best practices to draw attention and interest to your dealership while simultaneously keeping your best technicians happy.

1. Simplify the Interview Process

The employee experience starts with the interview, which means you need to make a great first impression if you want to win out over the other 10 dealerships a candidate may be considering.

2. Do Your Job Market Research

This can be especially helpful in determining fair market salary and other employee benefits. Making your employee compensation package competitive will be the difference between a great technician accepting your offer or passing for another dealership or repair shop.

3. Create a Mentorship Program

Not every new hire will be a superstar out of the gate. And even some of your more experienced technicians could stand to improve a specific set of skills or techniques. Creating a mentorship program allows your tenured technicians to pass down their knowledge and know-how to the new generation.

4. Send Your Technicians Back to School

Want to make sure your entire team is top of their game? Send your technicians back to school or start your own training program. Not only will this ensure your technicians can offer the services your customers are requesting, but when technicians feel like you are invested in them, they become invested in you.

5. Equip Your Team with the Latest Technology and Equipment

In any career it can be difficult to do your job without the right equipment, but even more so in the automotive industry. If your department isn’t spending the money to arm your team with the necessary technology and equipment, they may be more inclined to look for another dealership who will.

The supply and demand of auto technicians has created an extremely competitive market which has left many service departments wondering which direction to turn. But with these simple tactics, your next hire could be right around the corner.

Today’s service department is facing a supply and demand dilemma: increasingly busy service bays operated by increasingly less staff. A quandary which has led countless service department managers and directors to ask, “how can we do more with less?”

The answer: efficiency.

Calibrating your operations to make the most of the team you already have might just be the release valve you’ve been looking for. Because there will never be more hours in the day, but you can always do more with the hours you have.

To that end, we’ve gathered nine tactics to improve efficiency and scale your service department business to meet demand and maybe even grow revenue.

Top 9 Efficiency Tactics

“Efficiency is doing better what is already being done.” – Peter Drucker

The power of efficiency is seen best in the improved productivity and overall output of your team. Removing the timewasters and roadblocks allows your team to work better and work faster.

1. Training and Processes

No doubt your team has been thoroughly trained to do their jobs to the best of their ability, however, that doesn’t always translate to doing their jobs in the most efficient manner. By setting clear and precise processes (and then training your team accordingly) you can ensure that your entire team works to the same standard and productivity level – reducing inefficiencies by clearly communicating how every job is expected to be completed.

2. Finding the Right Schedule

Picture this: the first hour of the day your service team is slammed with business, every team member working feverishly to complete jobs on time. A few hours later, and your service bay is only half-filled, team members catching their breath from the early morning rush. The problem is clear, and the problem is scheduling.

Scheduling correctly removes the peaks and valleys that result in harried works left increasingly burnt out, balancing the workload to make the best use of your business hours and your team.

Pro-Tip: Offering pick-up and delivery not only improves the customer experience but allows your team to control the entire process. Meaning you can be certain your service bays remain busy throughout the entire day.

3. Removing Non-Billable Tasks

Your service team shouldn’t be wasting their precious billable hours on non-billable tasks. That helps no one. By reducing or completely removing these menial tasks you free up your service team’s day to focus solely on the jobs that will drive business and drive revenue.

4. Using a Business Development Center

In line with removing non-billable tasks, investing in a BDC is one of the best ways to support your service team. Instead of taking hours to schedule appointments and follow-up with customers, your service team can redirect their efforts to the jobs they were trained and hired to do.

Plus, BDC’s are trained to efficiently manage and support your service team, scheduling new appointments and bringing in additional revenue to your dealership.

5. Supporting Your Team with Technology

The right technology can be the difference between a team bogged down with tasks and one that continuously drives increased revenue. Whether that’s an improved system for tracking customers and their service needs or something as simple as a task management platform, finding the technology that enables your team to do their jobs better and faster is well worth the investment.

6. Improving Your Organizational Skills

Ever lost your keys and wasted a half hour running through your house checking under every couch cushion and in every cupboard? That kind of inefficiency can be the ruin of a perfectly running service department. Creating an organizational system (and sticking to it) means your team members never waste time hunting down the necessary car part or tool.

And while that may not seem like a huge improvement, these small moments can add up to afford your team a huge amount of additional time.

7. Streamlining Vehicle Pick-Up and Repair Order Close Out

Improving efficiency throughout the entire service process without improving the vehicle pick-up and repair order close out is kind of like running a marathon only to quit a mile from the finish line. Don’t let your team get hung up at the end by making the payment process a chore. Whether that means standardizing your billing or expanding the number of payment options you accept, your team and your customers will thank you.

Bonus: New technologies allow customers to pay remotely, removing the need to stop at the cashier altogether.

8. Investing in Your Customers

Speaking of customers, one of the best ways to ensure your bays are busy and your service team is running efficiently is to keep your loyal customers loyal. How? Offering incentives that service customers want, like the ones they identified in our 2020 research report.

Renewable benefit programs with those incentives promote customer loyalty and regularly scheduled maintenance. The benefits of which are twofold because happy customers are easier to work with and schedule around. Making your service team’s work easier and more predictable.

9. Reviewing Performance

Like any project, creating efficiencies in your team will require work and review. Check in to see how processes are impacting productivity. See how that new customer support system is being used by your service team. Analyze the scheduling to determine if you are still experiencing valleys of unused time. Continuing to look for new ways to improve will only help your team and grow your revenue.

Your service department has the potential to be a huge source of business and revenue. Don’t get bogged down with easy-to-fix inefficiencies – make the most of your team and see the revenue roll in.