Providing a Great Customer Experience

In this blog, we’ll discuss the automotive world. Specifically, we’ll discuss CarMax and Carvana and how their business models deliver the ultimate customer experience in every single way. It’s time to take a note from brands like these to stop focusing on where to find new deals and start looking around your store and your CRM to see how you can find ways to make more money and be more efficient.

That includes buying back what you sell, there is a lot of leeway for trades, thanks to the variety of units available. And, if you’re using PSX Digital, the technology is built-in, making it easy for dealers to incorporate this solution in their business model.

Companies like Carvana and CarMax are doing this in record numbers. They are also focused on doing things that save people time. It’s not always the money. The cost of time has more value than dealerships realize, especially for today’s busy consumers. And when you give people time, they become much more receptive to whatever you have to offer – and are willing to pay more

This should be a secondary process, not a process all its own. However, it still doubles the workload on your BDC if you try to create a full process out of it. And if you haven’t noticed, those workloads are already high. Plus, it’s not like employees are easy to find, either. Eventually, it reaches a breaking point where many dealership employees just can’t handle it.

No one knows where that breaking point is. It’s different for every dealer and salesperson, and for every customer interaction. What we do know, however, is that if you take good care of your existing customers in sales and service and when your service teams, marketing teams and sales teams are involved in getting that vehicle back, you’re going to find more opportunities to acquire more vehicles with less effort simply because you’re building the right relationships with your customers.

Technology has made it possible for you to do what you want faster and easier. As a result, more people are buying more stuff. Technology saves the consumer time, saves the dealership time and money, and helps improve efficiency. Dealers can employ fewer people to get things done because the technology takes care of it. For example, online appraisal tools make it easy for people to see what they can get for their trade, how much they could get to sell without buying, and even provide them with a guaranteed offer that’s good for a certain amount of time.

It's time to look inside the store to find ways to make more money with existing customers as well as transactions and stop spending all your time and effort on acquiring new customers. That starts by inspecting and improving the customer experience.

What Dealers Do vs. What Customers Expect

In normal times, we’d expect dealerships to have to be the best of the best with customer experience. In fact, people demand an impressive experience that delivers everything that they need. However, the past couple of years hasn’t really been “normal” and it has changed what consumers consider to be a five-star experience.

Perhaps we’ve lost the “wow” factor because of all the uncertainty in the world. Almost every service interaction involves a level of service that has been compromised. It could be due to employee shortages, supply chain issues, inventory issues, or anything else. As a result, most dealers are getting away with meeting expectations and having customers call that a five-star experience because they weren’t let down.

People can look around your dealership and see that things are tough. They can see for themselves that your inventory is light and that you can’t always keep hot units in stock. However, that does not give you the cause to deliver a subpar experience just because “people are buying anyway.”

You’re not absolved from delivering a premium experience simply because there is a higher demand due to supply chain issues. In fact, it is perhaps now more than ever that dealerships should be focused on delivering a better customer experience. After all, this is all going to balance out and the dealers that do phone in their service will get caught holding the bag as customers return to the dealers who were still delivering a premium experience even through product shortages, employee shortages, and higher prices because of all this supply and demand imbalance.

People expect a certain level of service. They expect dealers to go above and beyond to get their business. This is a time to make sure that you are doing it right because those are the dealerships that will prevail both now and, in the future, when things swing back around, supply balances out, and demand wanes.

The pandemic is teaching dealers that they shouldn’t be taking advantage of the leverage or getting away with the bare minimum because the business is there. Eventually, that business won’t be there and what will be remembered is the level of service that people experienced when they came to your dealership.