Industry Updates | Better Car People

Analyzing Your Dealership's Customer Engagement

Written by Matthew Belk | November 13, 2019

You might think that you’re doing great at working with customers, and you may be, but there’s always room for improvement. Analyzing your customer engagement helps you improve no matter how great your dealership does.

Analyze how you’re engaging with your customers and find out where you need to improve. Once you’ve got a grip on what needs to be improved, you can start implementing changes to engage with customers better. You’ll start to see your sales increase, which is never a bad thing. 

To start this process of selling more, look at your different communication mediums, such as emails, voicemails, text, and chat.

Emails

Besides the quality of the emails you’re sending out, the main focus here is to see how quickly you’re getting emails to your leads.

While this is easy to do during the day, you want to make sure you have something set for your after-hour leads. Make sure you have something in place, whether that’s an overnight BDR or taking shifts answering calls until a certain time at night. The more leads you’re responding to immediately, the more you’ll be selling. 

Also, analyze how your follow up performs. The initial point of contact is important, but it’s also important to follow up well for the next week. Most of your customers aren’t going to drop thousands of dollars on a car after one great response from you, so make sure you’re nurturing your relationship with them so you’re there when they make a decision.

Voicemail

Your voicemails are another place that need to be analyzed. Like emails, you should be making calls quickly when a lead comes in. If they don’t answer, make sure you’re leaving a voicemail that inspires them to call back. Since you’re not directly talking to a lead, you have to make them want to listen to your entire voicemail and call you back.

An easy way to do this is to answer any and all questions your leads have. Your customers want transparency; buyers today aren’t going to buy unless you’re upfront with them, so mentioning things like the price of a vehicle are important to getting that callback. 

 

Text

More than likely you’ve hopped on board with the texting train that’s hit the automotive industry. If you haven’t, you should definitely look into it. Texts are a quick and easy way to get in touch with your leads, and they’re more likely to respond compared to leaving a voicemail. 

When it comes to analyzing texts, make sure they’re short, sweet, and to the point. With that being said, also include the name of your dealership as well as double checking that you have permission to text the customer. Don’t break the trust that your customer has with you by sending text after text without any response from the customer. That’s spam, and everyone hates spam, plus it doesn’t work.

 

Chat

Online chat functions are an easy way to talk to leads as they’re looking at your website. You’ve got them before they’ve even left their desk, so they’re much more receptive to your dealership. Just like everything else, you want to make sure you’re answering these inquiries as quickly as possible with as much quality as possible.

Make sure that you’re answering the specific questions that the lead has, and if you don’t know the answer, don’t feel shy about bringing someone else into the equation. Also, make sure that you’ve gathered all the information you need in order to follow up with the customer.