Following the Umbrella Model for Customer Retention

Have you made any major purchases online recently? Where did you start? Probably with a quick Google search – oh look, 1 million results to sift through. You start scrolling down, review sites pop up, retailers, industry news. You click on a video review, and in it is a link to the amazon page, but wait now you have to sign up for an Amazon account. You go to pay – sign up for PayPal. It’s finally all ordered, better check the UPS tracking link in your email that you have to sign into. And now once it’s finally arrived the manual is missing and one of the parts is broken, better search up the manufacturer site and wait three weeks for them to respond to your email. Sound familiar?

Customer retention comes from a pleasant customer experience, which means not bouncing leads around like a sadistic pinball machine through the jungle of your purchasing procedure. The Umbrella Model for customer retention prioritizes a homogeneous experience, put everything under one system. Karl Erik Gustafsson attributes the origination of the term ‘Umbrella Model’ to Stanford Economics Professor James N Rosse, and applied infrequently in Scandinavia to refer to the hierarchical order of the local and regional newspapers, where local news fell under the umbrella of the bigger organizations. Jason Sprenger expanded the term to public relations, detailing the importance of containing all elements of an organizations PR effort under one system - keeping your audience under your umbrella. I use the term Umbrella Model to refer to the practice of general consolidation of software services and procedures in the online and offline aspects of your business.

The Umbrella starts with single sign on, even better if sign on is enforced as late into the process as possible. You want to retain customers, not bounce them elsewhere for information. Getting a lead to provide any kind of information about themselves is a huge privilege you have to earn, throw them a bone first and entice them to stay.

One way to win over customer loyalty is to put them in contact with a real person – and no, some text popup with ‘Talk to Chad!’ on your site does not count as a real person, I mean video and audio human contact. Remember, homogeneity is the key – we want that call to be on the website and feel as integrated as possible with the rest of the system.

When it comes to payment, have you considered online pay, through electronic financing? Think of it like integrated PayPal for your dealership, and all under one umbrella. Single sign on keeps your customer happy and engaged, and most importantly, retained.

After sales services are where many dealerships fall short in maintaining the dealer-buyer bond. If the effort is not made to reinforce the customer’s value to the dealership to form some sort of bond, there are dozens of equally competent service providers your customers will find with a simple google search.

What are you doing to keep your CX on top of your customers? Considering the Umbrella Model when implementing software solutions will improve the purchasing experience, and will reflect in the retention of a much happier client base. There’s no need to buy a chat service, and a document sharing service, and a video call service. Providers like uShare.to enable digital connections on all customer channels, and integrate into your existing online system. Keep it all in one, under one umbrella, and everyone will walk away happy (and stay out of the rain).

Sources

https://www.bulldogreporter.com/redefining-and-rethinking-pr-introducing-the-umbrella-model-of-public-relations/

http://www.nordicom.gu.se/sites/default/files/kapitel-pdf/41_KEG.pdf

With the new year comes a new crop of exciting automobile dealership technologies. These software solutions are sure to bring your dealership on par with the Jetsons in 2018 - minus the flying cars. Consider face to face sales from your basement recliner, customers purchasing a car from their kitchen table, consolidating all your cluttered leads into one system, and even showcasing your showroom floor in the virtual world. Every new year brings new exciting opportunities to push your dealership to the next level, will you make 2018 the year you finally flush out your CX?

1 - Chat gives way to CX

Over the last few years, Dealerships have benefited greatly from website chat in response to the car buyer moving online. However, it is now almost universally implemented, and no longer provides differentiation, nor even fully lives up to what the online buyer expects today. Dealerships must adopt a “Customer Experience” mindset – mapping the experience across the entire buying process, and implementing technologies that seamlessly lead the customer through successive stages. This has multiple components – engaging the online buyer through the decision phase, ensuring a seamless experience across devices, getting sales reps in front of the customer as soon as possible, and leading them through to sales closure, and beyond.

Our uShare.to for Dealerships focuses on this specific problem, offering multiple communication channels to engage prospects online (video, audio, chat, mobile messaging), lead them through the sale to contracting, and enabling services beyond the sale – all in a single CX environment.

2 – Electronic Payment Options

Like it or not, paper is slowly becoming an archaic sales medium, offering more inconvenience and fewer benefits than electronic payment as financial software options continue to improve. With much of the sales process already taking place online, contract closure and financial arrangements now too are shifting to the digital side. eSignature for example, allows customers to instantly clinch the contract, rather than going through cumbersome paperwork. Online transactions are heavily protected through encryption, which in abstraction prevents anyone from stealing your personal information, and we continue to see a steady improvement in security measures. The Ovum Global Payments Insight Survey of 2017, in conjunction with ACI Worldwide, found online payment systems have continued to grow in the global market, with now over 80% of organizations citing online payment integration as a major benefit to their organization.

3 – Big Data and the Weight of the Internet

You know more about your customers than any previous generation of business. The International Data Corporation predicts that in less than a decade there will be 163 zettabytes of data available, that’s the capacity of more than one hundred BILLION of your 1TB hard drives, nearly 50 hard drives per person on earth. If you estimate there are ten billion electrons in fifty kilobytes, 2e20 kilobytes in 200 zettabytes, and each electron weighs about 1e-30kg, the weight of just the ones and zeros of all that data would be about 0.05 kg (Cass). Those are some heavy ones. We have all this data, what can we do with it? Predictive analytics allow you to target specific customers with cars they are likely to prefer, these targeted customers are more likely to convert leads than generalized campaigns, showing an over 100% lift over the non-targeted ads according to a Toyota marketing study. Big data goes beyond lead acquisition, following through the purchasing habits of your customers allows you to better target them for after sales service and future purchases.

4 – Online Showroom Floors

One of the rising technologies that has yet to be widely implemented, but continues to develop in the wake of recent social and entertainment technological leaps is the virtual showroom. A promising technology of the future, online showroom floors are beginning to crop up in dealership sites. With the social boom of virtual reality games in the past few months (VR Chat the lead offender) virtual reality is finally making its break into the general market. As aspects such as customer support and follow up move to video, even the showroom is dissecting into ones and zeros. A study by the research and consulting firm Frost & Sullivan found traditional dealers will be restructured, with central hubs in dense population centers showcasing an entirely digital showroom. This hub location will then direct the incoming leads to outer stores, storing inventory outside of the heart of the cities while attracting the heart of the consumer traffic (Frost). The transition won’t be all at once, and don’t expect to see many VR showrooms in 2018, but the first footholds of this exciting technological market are beginning to pop up, and if the excitement surrounding virtual reality continues to build in 2018, online showrooms may be in the more near future than you think.

References

Cass                     http://discovermagazine.com/2007/jun/how-much-does-the-internet-weigh

Bedgood              http://www.relevateauto.com/data-driven-automotive-marketing-local-                                                dealerships/

Frost                     http://www.frost.com/prod/servlet/press-release.pag?docid=288841360

Ovum                    https://www.aciworldwide.com/-/media/files/collateral/trends/2017-global-                                       payments-insight-survey-overview.pdf

For better or worse, the internet has become an indispensable appendage in our every day lives. Many of us would rather spend every minute glued to the web than have to face the wild west of the disconnected world our forbears suffered through. Why bother dressing up nice, showering, wrestling with flossing and brushing, when you can pop on some pjs and surf the web from the comfort of your home? Sites like Amazon have pampered us with an all-inclusive shopping experience, offering anything from a to z.

Car buyers go online

The online market continues to grow in the wake of the millennial shift. Online purchases have increased from 3% to 10% of total retail sales since 2008, and project to continue to grow at similar pace in the coming years (US Census). This trend extends to the automotive market, where the average number of dealerships visited has decreased from 5 to 1.6 in the past decade as customers spend more time researching online and less time window shopping in dealerships (McKinsey 2014). Why waste time skipping from dealer to dealer when all the information you need is sitting a search away? According to an Accenture study, car buyers value saving time as much as saving money, and are willing to drop a little more change for a more fluid experience.

The missing piece

Like all new things, there are some kinks that still need to be ironed out. While less dealerships are being visited, millennial customers are visiting the dealership they purchase their vehicle at more times during the shopping process than their less digitally inclined counterparts (Accenture). The online experience is not servicing all components of the customer-dealer relationship. Where are we falling short? For one, the internet can make us forget how important it is to listen to others. Customers shopping in the United States highly value salespeople who demonstrate attentive listening, nearly twice as much as customers sampled in China (Accenture). Most online dealer services only offer text chat, hardly the face to face sales we are used to.

Marrying online and offline – The lesson for Dealerships

How can we work towards the old time comfort of face-to-face interaction with the modern appeal of comfort, convenience, and speed? While many dealerships have already started offering web chat on their websites, tools like uShare.to which also offer video and voice chat for the website let you retain the impact of in-person car sales even in the web environment. Moreover, tools like uShare.to go beyond the initial interaction, and simplify the entire sales cycle. You can easily involve other stakeholders in the conversation – need a quote from your sales manager? Need to bring in a banker to finish the deal? Simply add them to the online conversation without anyone having to dance around busy schedules or to drive over to the dealership. Why bother bouncing around from email to web platform to in person conversation when you can host the entire process through uShare.to. And don’t forget about after sales support – have an issue or question about their new purchase? Your customers can connect right away to your agents through video chat, easy peasy. The customer is never forced to visit the dealership during the sale process – they only have to show up when they need to give their shiny plaything a spin, collect the keys, or drop in for the occasional servicing.

If the technology to improve customer experience exists, why isn’t it implemented? Ignorance and convenience prevents the implementation of new systems in favor of the way it has always been done – if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Did you know over 75% of medical communications are still done over fax (Vox)? Many new technologies are too daunting to try to implement, and a whole system overhaul often simply isn’t feasible. Tools like uShareto bridge the technology intimidation with a focus on customer experience, and fit right into your existing processes and technology.