If a Picture Is worth a 1000 Words, What Does the “before/after cell phones” Mean to Your Bottom Line?
For the purposes of the intent of this post, let’s simplify the multitude of artistic interpretations to two words … “Customer Preference.”
For while the customer may not necessarily “always be right”, when it comes to getting the opportunity to earn and keep their business, perhaps it’s finally time, to provide an experience that incorporates the obvious preferred technology medium, across every interaction, between your business and the prospect/customer.
Given the statistic that as of January 2024, American adults spend a daily average of more than 6 hours online, let’s trace the common digital path, of the clear majority of your prospect to customer life-cycle events:
Search Engine – Simply put, are you found for the most relevant terms, compared to your competition AND how many stars do you have? Those stars are about your reputation, which needs to be managed (Note, the usage of the word managed and not controlled. Like CSI surveys, this will most likely be a focus, for the foreseeable future).
Your Website – With the proliferation of mobile devices, this can be a tough choice, between a dedicated mobile/desktop service and a single adaptive/responsive website. Ultimately, if it doesn’t elicit a positive emotion (meaning, does it work/load properly and does it look as professional as the user expects), you may again, lose the opportunity of the transaction. … Oh … you have a static website? Time to consider migrating to a new industry standard for a variety of Google reasons, not to mention addressing “specials” pages that are blank, employee bio pages devoid of the personality of your staff and the all too common (and yet mostly avoidable) “cookie-cutter” design.
2 B. Live Chat – From the obvious question of ‘availability of an operator’, to the content of the online conversation, typical interactions can be less predictable, less controlled and perhaps less desirable than what both you and your customers may hope for, given the “dance”, between the goal of the online shopper (typically to stay anonymous) and the chat-provider (typically to get a phone number for a verbal interaction). Can the chat service do more than request a name and number, for “someone to contact them shortly, with the best answer”?Your prospect e-communications – If you’re fortunate enough to have gotten past the first few hurdles, each one of your contact points should be inspected for a litany of possible issues: delayed response times, grammatical/spelling errors, irrelevant content to the request, perception of too generic content, broken links, missing images, etc. Additionally, do they include messages from the staff with whom they have a relationship, or from a generic address? If this post was poorly written, would you have made it this far? Each e-communication to your prospects and customers is just as important.
Onsite facility – Do you offer complimentary wireless access, in all of your customer lounge areas and is it of adequate speed? While we may all be on 4G/XLTE networks in the future, for now, I’d like to watch my sports, without buffering, while waiting for services.
Upsell and F&I – After agreeing to a purchase, does your customer have the opportunity to customize their purchase via an electronic accessories catalog, along with an expedited signing of financial paperwork?
Service Lane – And in your service lane, do your customers make buying decisions from a presentation of a hand-written RO and the best efforts of a service advisor, to explain the need to service the flux-capacitor via ‘hand-puppets’? And what happens for all those customers who dropped their vehicles off and are now at home or work? Ultimately, what’s no longer acceptable, is a 1 page, flat, piece of paper. It’s about investing in a software platform that drives internal efficiencies and customer-facing best practices, with a strong recommendation of both a comprehensive fixed operations platform, for visibility of every customer pay transaction.
Social Media – And after all the potential pitfall points prior to purchase, you’ve got a huge choice to make, regarding the commitment to posts and updates to your prospect turned customer. While many customers will want to associate with you after a positive-experience/transaction, via your Facebook and Twitter accounts, as a general rule, it’s better to be prepared to post fresh versus generic content and very timely replies, to both positive and negative comments, to promote a one-to-one relationship. Without the recipe of fresh content posted quickly, social media can detract from the customer’s relationship with your business and staff.
Alas, while your customers may be able to do business with your dealership, for ALL their automotive needs, you’ll need to consider dealing with the best vendor for each customer contact point above, for as the axiom “a mile wide, an inch deep” can describe an individual, it can also be relevant to a company which doesn’t invest sufficiently, in the specific service areas noted above; however where a relationship between a website and a CRM, or between a reputation management and social media service can be leveraged, consideration of a single-source vendor is warranted.
The seven digital touch-points above are the start of a checklist, to ensure the best opportunity for interaction. I’ll elaborate on two, to show you that each one should be thoroughly vetted:
Point 1 – CRM - The very acronym CRM (Customer Relationship Management) should communicate the innate value of the solution, when implemented across your sales department. From prospect to customer, the cradle-to-grave philosophy of a functional CRM should increase the opportunity of a sale, via proper message distribution, directed at the appropriate time and via the preferred medium, of the customer. With sales force automation (SFA), your staff should feel the reward of a competent CRM versus the “stick” of a big-brother software solution. Ease of use for sales staff (the ground level user) with true visibility for management (real time and reporting) and marketing support for non-purchases (follow-up for future purchases), tend to be three key ingredients for a CRM to be absorbed into the ‘culture’ of the dealership.
Point 2 – Service Lane Customer Pay Repair Orders - It’s somewhat ironic that in most dealerships, the fixed operations department was the first to embrace technology, typically through parts catalogs, but has been slower to adopt the digital experience, in comparison the CRM utilization in the front end; and yet, while often being the most measurable of all profit centers, most fixed ops managers are struggling with information collected in a DMS that doesn’t give complete visibility/accountability and still using a paper multi-point inspection (complete with less-than-legible handwriting and smudges and/or a coffee stain). Does your MPI sheet look like this?
If you’re a professional, like the athletes and teams we follow in the NFL, even they’re using now-standard best practices for planning and performance review. Empower the customer to make their own decisions, empower advisors to communicate effectively to customers and empower inter-department communications, to reap ROI and results.
While all of the seven interactions are important, to complete the ‘circle’ of the customer life-cycle, I note the two above, with consideration that in addition to the actual SaaS product, one key differentiator tends to drive success of the product’s usage:
… The support of that SaaS tool, via consistent onsite consultation. Given the inevitable ‘focus-shift’ most managers face (factory, customer, and/or employee generated), it’s only understandable that not only do you measure your staff, but that an SaaS Consultant analyze, inspect and report on your usage, progress and opportunities for improvement. Again, like professional athletes, these ‘personal trainers’ should maximize your opportunities, based on available resources and mitigate any liabilities.
And up to now, if you’ve been reticent to jump into these mediums, then the good news, is that you don’t have to have a personal Facebook page, you don’t have to send tweets about what you had for lunch and you don’t need to upload images of pets or sunsets to Instagram, in order to respect the power of the digital medium, to convert prospects into customers. The Road to the Sale can be found by inspecting each of the points above, as if you’re the one making the purchase.
One closing thought … consider using your own mobile device, for something other than texting and visiting websites. Tomorrow, take images of your facility, as a prospect and customer would typically do a walk-through. A digital tool, to give you a fresh look, at the ‘snapshot’ view that your customers experience of your brick-and-mortar location.
An eye-opener? Perhaps. But the good news, is that it’s never been easier, to hear the story, of a picture.
