In the past, it wasn’t uncommon for employees to spend their whole working lives with a single company. People would start in their late teens and many would retire without ever having worked anywhere else. However, businesses, in general, and dealerships, specifically, are experiencing less loyalty from employees today than ever before in history.…

Frequent travelers have many choices when choosing airlines. Some choose an airline for their frequent flier benefits; some for their convenient routes or frequent itineraries and some have airlines chosen for them by their companies. For many years, Delta Airlines has been at or near the bottom of almost every survey conducted regarding airline customer service. In fact,…

Manufacturers are increasingly introducing programs designed to increase brand loyalty, and car buyers are staying more loyal than ever before. One of the most recent examples is GM’s…

“The British are coming” shouted Paul Revere in his famous midnight ride frantically trying to warn colonists of the impending attacks by England.

Did you know that statistically only 4 in 10 people cared about this news? Only 40% of colonists supported the revolution, with some historians even estimating support in the 20-30% range. The other…

In the automotive world, the bottom line is that many dealerships experience very high turnover rates with employees, especially in sales. Our world is one of high stress, long hours and feast or famine. (This might not be as true in the service departments.) However, the face of your dealership to a customer who bought their car from you is their salesperson. Yes, it is.…

As social media gets more and more entrenched in our daily lives, it’s becoming the easiest and most visible place for one of the most important things your company can have but can’t buy – word-of-mouth marketing.

You can have your customer experience down pat, a loyalty program that rocks and customers lined up to do business with you; but does that mean…

The whole idea of a loyalty program is to encourage and reward customers for doing business with you. The easier you make it for them to earn rewards and the more desirable those rewards are, the more likely a customer will utilize your program by returning to your business. How many supermarket “loyalty”…

I recently read an article about a recent Forrester Report titled “Banks and Retailers: You Cannot Price Your Way Out of Bad Customer Experiences.” It was quite fascinating but there was one part that really resonated with…

Creating a loyal customer is sort of like getting married. The introduction is followed by a period of courtship and, if all goes well, commitments are made. Loyalty in the automotive world is something that everyone battles from the OEM level to the dealership. Did you know, however, that the longer you’ve had a customer the harder it is to keep them?

Logic…

It’s not a new idea to have one of your salespeople working the service drive. Opportunities and circumstances exist where it may be beneficial for the customer to trade-in their car that needs to be repaired. Having someone who can not only identify those opportunities but who also knows how to present it to the customer properly is rare.

That being said,…

Dealerships today spend most of their marketing budgets on acquiring new customers. Those ads in the newspapers aren’t really meant for current of past customers, they are meant to attract new customers. The cost of customer acquisition ranges from 6 to 10 times more than the cost…

In today’s world of constant noise, it’s more difficult than ever to market your dealership. Dealers are constantly trying to guess where the best ROI is when considering how to spend marketing dollars. How much money do I invest in traditional marketing? Online marketing? Direct mail marketing? The rep from each medium will tell you that their media is the best to use for…

Can efforts to capture customer loyalty be thwarted by employee loyalty?

Evidence gathered from top retail groups, including auto dealerships, indicates that employee loyalty directly affects customer loyalty and thus business results.

Dealer operators and their managers do their business, their stakeholders and their shareholders disservice…

When did you last share with someone important why you enjoy him or her? We’re fast to convey disappointment or dissatisfaction with others, but uplifting the attributes in them we like feels rather strange.

Yet when it comes to building loyalty, whether in customers, coworkers or family members, nothing will engage their attention – and draw them to us in…