Have you ever noticed that a single interaction between your customer service representatives and customers could make or break the relationship? At the time when your customers can jump over to your closest competitor, it is critical to identify these moments and try to avert disaster.

At car dealerships, customer service must be impeccable. A competitive business environment demands dynamicity and adaptation to change, so it is your mission to see what works and what does not. But how?

By employing some of the strategies listed below, your dealership should be able to communicate all the right information at the right time, and your customer service department should boost performance, and thus remain competitive. Let us dive in.

1. Listen

Listening is at the core of every relationship, be it romantic, family or business.

By listening to what your customers are saying through interactions with your dealership, you can focus in on essential patterns that will help your store connect with your customers better. Speech recognition and text mining software, such as R, RapidMiner, Python, Spark, etc., should do the trick – thus retrieving enough information based on lexical analysis of your customer communication processes.

Create a scale and prescribe what your yeas and nays are to detect soft spots that need to be mended and re-mended. For example, what if you observe that your customer service representatives, when texting customers, are using prohibited jargon or other vocabulary forms that are not in line with your company’s culture? This can, in turn, irritate the customer. You need to outline ways of dealing with such situations, without having the customer and your business undergo unpleasant experiences.

2. Feedback

If you have zero feedback channels, you are in deep trouble. These are critical points which should enable getting (anonymous) data on your customers’ opinions and attitudes towards your business and sales reps. Just think – there has to be a way of obtaining a direct reaction from your customers.

For example, such ways can include email and contact forms, SMS, reviews (on Facebook and Google My Business), customer satisfaction page, blog comments, and other client feedback collecting points, such as surveys and questionnaires.

But mind you that positive comments can give you a pretty good confidence boost – but will not help improve your business. On the other hand, negative and sharp comments – based on reality, of course – surprisingly will. Never underestimate the power of good criticism. If you learn how to map pain points and correct them, you will be able to progress and grow.

Just follow this amendment loop: ask, fix, improve, change, ask… and on and on it goes.

3. Ask

If you are drawing up a questionnaire and have multiple choice answers, always add an optional field where customers can express their opinion – in their own words, such as:

• What was your experience with our customer service representatives?
• Have we filled out the promise made in our ads?
• Do you have anything to add and help us overcome difficulties?

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