4 Scaries Haunting Your Dealership
Article Highlights:
- Customer experience should be a treat, not a scary trick.
- 4 things that frighten your customers from ever coming back.
When a haunted house is extra scary, you remember that experience for a long time. When your customers’ experience in your dealership is extra scary, they are going to remember that for a long time, too. Customers never know what is waiting to pop out at them next – pushy salespeople, old magazines, and stacks of paper, oh my!
Here are four scaries frightening customers at your dealership:
1. Ghosts
Salespeople – there one minute, gone the next. It’s no fault of theirs, but during their time with a customer, they leave them alone to get test drive keys and negotiate deals with the sales manager. This leaves your customer wondering if she has a trusting salesperson to work with or if she is simply seeing a ghost.
2. Echoing voices
Your receptionist asks your customer for her name when she arrives. When she gets to F&I, she is asked for her information again. When she returns for service a few months later, she finds herself repeating her information yet another time. Is she hearing an echo, or did she really just repeat herself three times? Shouldn’t her information carry from department to department?
3. Someone hiding in the shadows
A customer wants a transparent experience at your dealership. Your F&I manager hiding in the shadows of his computer monitor is not delivering that transparent experience. The customer doesn’t know what the F&I manager is typing and why she can’t see what he is seeing. A lack of transparency means a lack of trust, which can mean resistance to purchase aftermarket products.
4. Doors locking behind you
Nothing is scarier than the feeling of being trapped. When your customer is stuck in F&I signing papers or sitting in the lounge waiting for their car to be done in service, it can feel like they will never escape. Feeling trapped in your dealership will not make them too excited to come back anytime soon.
Conclusion
A bad customer experience can leave your dealership feeling like the haunted house at the top of the hill that no one dare enter. Delivering a good customer experience doesn’t have to be hard. Having the right system in place will allow for a smooth, transparent, even fun experience. Rid your dealership of its ghosts so customers leave feeling like their experience was a treat rather than a scary trick.
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Marketing Communications, Reynolds and Reynolds
Madeline is a Marketing Communications Supervisor at Reynolds and Reynolds. Since joining Reynolds, she has marketed key solutions such as the docuPAD® system, eWorkflow™, and Reynolds Retail Management System. She is currently a supervisor over the Reynolds Account Based Marketing team with a focus in fixed operations and the business office. She received her bachelor’s degree in Communication from Wittenberg University.
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