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.

Last year, dealership service sales were estimated to reach $49.5 billion in the United States alone. For dealerships focused on their business development (and even those who aren’t), stats like that are extremely promising – and point to a much larger opportunity.

It’s almost too easy to assume new vehicle sales would be the main source for business development. After all, the revenue off a new vehicle will always be much higher than that of say a typical repair order. But such a narrow focus on one source of business growth can leave your dealership stalled out – ignoring the potential profit center within your service department.

Bonus: A whopping 46% of service customers plan to buy their next vehicle from the same dealership servicing their existing car. That’s an opportunity you don’t want to waste.

Refocusing Your Business Development

Your service department offers a unique opportunity for business development – unlocking heightened revenue and sales growth. And who doesn’t want that?

But first things first, setting your benchmarks.

A couple of things you might want to consider when taking stock of your current metrics and future goals include:

1. How much revenue is your service department currently bringing in? What percentage of your total revenue does this make up?
2. How does that compare to your competitors or industry standards?
3. How many repair orders make up that revenue number?
4. How many sales are coming from repeat customers? If the number is low, why is it low?
5. What are your most profitable services? In number of sales and revenue per sale?
6.  

Answering these questions will give you a good idea of where your service department currently stands and where it can be improved. Plus, you’ll get a good idea of specific services that will lead to the most profitable growth in the future.

Tactics for Business Development

Business development doesn’t just happen. These four business development tactics have helped drive growth for dealerships and businesses before you, and could be your key to new sales, improved revenue, and exponential expansion.

1. Invest in Your Resources

Having the right team is crucial to your business development success, a key reason why so many dealerships have invested in a business development center (BDC). These centers focus on a variety of sales and business development goals, and can act as a key driver of service business – bringing in new appointments and getting referrals. Which lets your service department focus on what they do best.

While the up-front investment can seem like an unnecessary expense on an already crowded bottom-line, the customer service and experience these departments are able to provide will quickly prove to be worth the extra cost. And as they bring in more customers, they also bring in more revenue. Covering the investment and then some.

Putting it into Practice: Setting Appointments

Between setting appointments, meeting with customers, and actually servicing the customers’ cars, your team has quite the daily to-do list. By reallocating the precious time they would normally use to set new appointments, your team can focus on providing the customers in your dealership with the highest possible standard of quality and overall experience.

Meanwhile, your BDC can focus their efforts on setting additional revenue-generating appointments for your team: reaching out to repeat customers, scheduling first time visits, and getting referrals.

2. Regularly Communicate with Customers

Did you know that in a recent survey only 44% of dealership service customers stated that they prefer to get all their vehicle service needs performed at a dealership? That leaves a whopping 56 percent of customers that are taking their business and their revenue elsewhere at least some of the time – and that doesn’t even include people who never take their vehicle to dealership service departments.

Communicating with new and existing customers may seem like an obvious business development tactic, but it’s one worth repeating. If a car-owner isn’t aware of the services you offer, how can they be expected to come to you for that service? Regularly reaching out to customers, whether through an email campaign or a social media ad, keeps you top of mind for the next time they find themselves in need of an unexpected repair or just their regularly scheduled maintenance.

Putting it into Practice: Running a Conquest Campaign

This type of campaign specifically targets customers looking for a service or repair from a competitor. The best part about a campaign of this nature? You are reaching out to qualified individuals actively looking for a service you offer. Take advantage of that moment and make them a customer for life. Not sold? When we helped run a DriveSure direct mail conquest campaign for Mazda of Orland Park, they generated over $100,000 in revenue. Talk about growth!

3. Add Value to Your Service

Add-ons, incentives, loyalty programs. Whatever you call it, customers love it. And it’s the reason they come back again and again. When you can directly add value to what would normally be a typical repair or service, you win more than just customer loyalty, you win positive word of mouth.

Why does that matter? Because when you can rely on positive word of mouth, your customers will do your business development for you. Referring friends and family to your dealership the next time they need anything from a tire rotation to a transmission tune-up.

Putting it into Practice: Partnering with a Service Provider

Partnering with an incentive service provider, like DriveSure, makes it that much more enticing for your customers to return to your dealership for their regularly scheduled maintenance. With renewable benefits like premium roadside assistance and road hazard tire protection, the added value makes it even more enticing for vehicle owners to do business with you.

4. Align Your Service with The Customer Journey

Fact: A bad experience is the leading reason why customers don’t return to their dealership for ongoing service. It’s no wonder why customer experience has become such a hot topic. In today’s market, customers expect an outstanding experience, and more than that, they expect it to be personalized to their preferences and their specific journey.

Doing so will also help to avoid the five most common service customer defection points along that journey. If you want to explore those defection points further, and get tips on how to overcome them, grab a copy of our free guide: Avoiding Potholes in the Customer Journey.

Whether your customer needs their first tire rotation, or they are looking to trade in their vehicle, when customers feel like an individual (instead of just a number) they respond with ongoing loyalty – and that can pay in dividends. In fact, according to HBR, “loyalty leaders…grow revenues roughly 2.5 times as fast as their industry peers.” 

Putting it into Practice: A Seamless Sales-to-Service Handoff

Every customer journey starts somewhere, and the majority of your customer journeys will start with the sale of a new car. But then what? Creating that seamless sales-to-service handoff is your starting point to ongoing service sales and future business growth – so it’s important you get it right.

What does that look like? Like the rest of their journey, this handoff will be personalized to the individual customer, but it can include setting the first service appointment at the point of sale or offering a tour of your service department. Whatever the means, the goal is to make that new sales customer comfortable with becoming your newest service customer.

The success of your business development strategy depends upon a multitude of factors, but by integrating just a few of these tactics, you’ll be well on your way to achieving your goals and driving new growth. And it all starts with your service department.