Customers expect an experience that is streamlined and hassle-free/friction-free. Regardless of the arena in which your business operates, they want you to be as easy to use as what they’ve experienced online. Channel shouldn’t matter: the info available online should be available in the store, and vice versa, and all channels with which you interact with the customer should be streamlined and integrated.

The digital disruption has already happened and our customers are utilizing our digital tools to interact with our service and parts departments. Specifically our dealerships website. It has been mentioned that close to seventy percent of our customers will do research online before their parts and services purchases. Where we have fallen behind is in the last estimation, less than TWO percent of the overall dealers website content is devoted to parts and services. How come the departments that typically produce over fifty percent of the operating profits has such a poor representation?

In a recent study performed by Google they mentioned that when a customer is performing their research the majority utilize a search engine search and other tire and auto websites. In fact…

63% - searched tire and auto websites

59% - searched tire brand websites

Unfortunately only 31% mentioned they went to your dealerships website…

Considering the lack of content on our dealerships websites I am really surprised that thirty one percent utilized this as a resource during their shopping experience. The goal should be to get your customer visiting your website for information as often as they have a question or need help. One of the first thing that should happen is to educate every customer that this is great tool or resource to use to get quick information. “What information are my service customers looking for?” The first place I would start is to listen to your incoming phone calls and log the questions that are being asked, make sure you have a reasonable solution with adequate information to fulfill the needs of those inbound calls. Next, ask your website provider for common information about searchable terms in your area and then finally look at your digital offerings and see how well you provide a solution.

Some things to consider when performing a review of your website I would ask yourself the following questions

Does your website….

• Provide a seamless experience
• Have sufficient information about service and parts
• Offer online scheduling
• Ability to sell your parts inventory
• Have parts specials
• Have landing page templates for brakes, batteries, tires, rental cars, express maintenance
• Do you have updated service specials that are consistent to your offline offerings in your other marketing campaigns
• How to videos of routine maintenance intervals
• Mobile optimized

Most of these are simply the basic steps to creating a service and parts presence but a majority of dealers do not utilize the digital tools out there that can help your customers’ digital exposure to your store and also drive traffic to your front door.

As I mentioned previously the digital disruption has already happened and we are behind the times. We need to run and fix our sites to meet the needs and demands of our current customer and naturally we will attract new customers that are routinely searching for the same information.