We’re failing. Consumers have moved on yet we’re still trying to do the things that we’ve always done. Fast and efficient communication with consumers is vital to maintaining and growing your dealership revenue. However, many dealerships keep hanging on to the old methods they have grown comfortable with: phone calls and emails. While these both are useful and should certainly be continued, these methods of communication simply do not allow customers to communicate as effectively as they used to.

Take a look at these statistics from Business2Community. According to Google, 70 percent of online traffic is from a mobile device. Realizing consumers’ choice of communication methods have changed, Google introduced Click-to-Call. Then more recently released messaging on mobile sites for consumers to communicate with businesses via text messaging.

Facebook has also enabled text-based communications in ads. In fact, most major retailers now have some sort of text-based notifications – from delivery services such as UPS and FedEx texting delivery updates, to airlines texting flight status updates and enabling boarding passes via text, to online retailers texting order status updates.

Do you really think all these major businesses would spend the time and money to implement and use texting platforms if they didn’t think customers would use it, and are not seeing results? No. There was plenty of testing, planning and focus groups involved. In the end, text messaging won. In fact, if your dealership turns on texting on your business page, you will see that the CTA for customers is texting… not phone calls.

Join the party and take the lead with customers at your dealership. They want to communicate through text. But, many dealerships aren’t equipped to correctly handle this form of communication, especially not in a two-way capacity. Yes, there are a lot of compliance and regulatory issues when it comes to text-based communications. But there are excellent services available that can safeguard your dealership and ensure compliance.

You want to communicate with your customers and, quite frankly, they want to communicate with you. Make sure all of today’s communication options are on the table, so that your customers can communicate and do business with you in the most efficient and desirable way THEY choose. As a result, your staff will produce more while doing less.