Is Your Dealership Customer Experience Living Up to Your Hype?
Imagine seeing advertising for a circus coming to town: the big top tent, elephants, dancing horses, trapeze artists, lion tamers, and the ringmaster. You can’t wait to take your family. When the big day arrives, you pack them up, and drive to the location of the circus.
But when you get there, there’s no tent, no elephants, no dancing horses, no trapeze artists, and no lion tamers. Instead of a ringmaster, you find a bearded lady in a ticket booth hoping to sell tickets to a show that is clearly not there.
Would you buy a ticket? Of course, you wouldn’t.
The brand promise let you down. You had a horrible experience. Your prospects will not buy an automobile either unless their customer experience meets their expectations when they arrive at your dealership.
Think about it.
You’re all set up for a big weekend in your mind. You’ve just produced the strongest ad campaign ever for the dealership. This one simply cannot miss . . . sales will be through the roof!
Then the weekend passes; units sold and gross were disappointing.
How could this happen?
Simply stated, most ad campaigns — and marketing plans in general — that you label a failure, fail for one reason and one reason only:
Prospects did not find the customer experience that they came to expect as a direct result from the advertising.
It wasn’t the media buy. It wasn’t the production. It was simply that you lost the customer before “hello” (the greeting) because you and your team did not deliver on prospects’ expectations.
Every employee should deliver on the dealership’s brand promise (what you provide your customer beyond the product and the price: your unique selling proposition, “USP”) at every customer touch point — at the dealership, on the phone and online.
The dealership must look alive and healthy . . . ready to do business. What we’re really talking about here is a complete paradigm shift and culture change.
It does not matter if it’s a three-day sale or the average Tuesday, when you’re delivering a customer experience that supports your brand promise, the likelihood of more sales at higher margins is much greater.
If you expect to be successful during the next decade by just saying you’re having “a sale” — or if you expect to win some “race to the bottom” when it comes to advertising the lowest price — your dealership will likely soon look like that bogus circus mentioned earlier.
Your dealership cannot just be a place you are hoping will collect the money without delivering an experience that really wows your prospects and customers.
Your customers and prospects expect more. Make it your dealership’s culture to deliver on the experience of your brand promise. Here’s what Mike Conley, Director of Marketing for the Sunset Auto Family and Binary Automotive Solutions client, has to say:
“We simply do not advertise prices (at least until a used vehicle reaches the 46-day aging bucket), rather, just our value proposition (Warranty Protection for Life). After all, we have no competitive advantage with price. No one does. The result: We are the No. 1 volume Chevrolet dealership in Washington state month and after month, year after year. Yeah, I would say this works!”
You have nothing to lose by finding out how to change your dealership culture while increasing your profitability, improving CSI, and destroying employee turnover, so please have a look at Binary Automotive Solutions’ video at www.DontRaceToTheBottom.com, then email or call James Binkley, CEO, for more information: [email protected] or 630-258-3439.
Previous articles by James Binkley:
Find Your Unique Selling Proposition and Quit Racing to the Bottom on Price