Poor service gets buyers revved up

Good customer service should be at the heart of every business

It’s not surprising of course that positive customer contact makes for an improved conversion rate.

But perhaps most surprising are the findings that some dealers could take longer than a week to respond while others didn’t respond at all.

With car manufacturers entrusting their brand to the vagaries of dealership customer service, it’s all too apparent that there is room for improvement.

Cover all bases

As in most businesses, car dealership clients make contact in a number of ways, by email, in person or over the phone, but perhaps unlike many other businesses the value of any one of these individual contacts can potentially run into many thousands of pounds. So how can it be acceptable on any level to leave any one of these approaches undervalued, underserviced or unanswered?

Customers expect the red carpet and dealers in turn need to recognise that in a high value market, so often it is the customer service, even ahead of the product itself; that will be the main influencing factor in the buying decision. The little touches can make all the difference – the friendly and knowledgeable welcome, the filter coffee and WiFi in the showroom, the free car wash and valet, the email reply within the hour but what about telephone calls?

Be prepared

Few businesses can afford to miss a telephone call. Car dealers certainly can’t. Yet front of house receptionists face a daily juggle, meeting and greeting ‘in person’ visitors, conscious that calls can be going unanswered in the background.

Resourcing is an issue, particularly to cover busy times, evenings and weekends, peaks and troughs in customer contact activity, lunch breaks, holidays, staff absences and emergencies, with dealers needing to ensure customers receive the same premium service whatever the time of day, whatever is happening within the dealership internally and whatever it is they need.

Get ahead of your competitors

Telephone answering really is critical, but all too often underestimated. If you get this element of your business right though, so many of the other pieces in the day-to-day jigsaw, slot into place too.

Also, there’s absolutely no point spending money on marketing to increase awareness and generate sales leads if you can’t then back up any new activity with a quality response.

With this in mind, increasingly dealers are looking to outsourced telephone answering solutions as a cost-effective way of taking the pressure off their in-house teams. There really is no room for complacency but with the right support, keeping customers happy and building that all important brand relationship needn’t be a headache.