When did you last walk through the customer entrance of your dealership and look at what is truly being experienced by the customer?

Forget for a moment whether a sales consultant’s work area is messy, or if there are smudges on the windows. Let’s look a little closer at what a customer could see, hear or feel when they interact with your dealership in any department. What’s really taking place behind the doors may be a real surprise to you. Taken from a customer’s perspective, you just might be failing to meet their most basic expectations. As a result, you could be damaging your dealership simply by being unaware of what happens on a daily basis down in the trenches.

Have you made an anonymous phone call to your dealership lately? Almost every store now utilizes some form of inbound call tracking. These systems all provide the ability to record and playback your customer’s inbound calls. When was the last time you actually listened to some of the recorded calls these systems provide?   Imagine a customer that calls your store, the receptionist gives a warm and friendly greeting but puts them through to the wrong department. Or worse, blindly transfers the customer to an employee’s voice mail (without giving them the opportunity to speak with another person that could assist them). Worse yet, many of the calls we have listened to clearly indicate the need for ongoing product training, as many times the sales consultant fails to answer even the most basic product questions. Would this be acceptable customer service?  How often is it happening in your dealership? The answer just might surprise you.

And what about your phone system itself -- Do you have a recording that customers hear when they are on hold? Is the message current and relevant? Imagine the embarrassment if you were still advertising a new car lease special for a 2012 model vehicle with the 2015 models sitting on the showroom floor. Or the “winterize your car today” message still running on July first. While obtaining current and relevant messaging may sound like a core, it’s really not. Visit the website Fiverr.com and you can have a year’s worth of professional messaging done at one time very inexpensively, and simply upload the recordings when the time is appropriate.

What about your Internet/BDC department and those individuals creating emails for marketing campaigns? If a customer “enters” your dealership electronically, are you making sure that those emails and marketing pieces are addressed in a friendly and personal way? It happens more frequently than you may think that an e-mail template is filled with the words “first name” and your message is literally addressed “Dear [First_Name].” It’s these little things that can make the customer turn right around and defect to another dealership. When was the last time you actually took the time to read the correspondence that is sent from you with your name on it? Who is responsible for checking the grammar and sentence structure of the thousands of pieces of correspondence your store sends out each month?

Pretend you are a customer and walk through your front door. Call your own dealership, both day and night, and listen to how you are greeted and what happens when a call is transferred, or put on hold. Is it perhaps terminated unexpectedly? 

Send yourself a test Internet lead from your website, or a third party site, and let the flow of emails find their way to your inbox for a month or two. Do any of these communications surprise, disturb or shock you?

Taking a little time to “walk through all the doors and peer through the windows of your dealership” could help erase mistakes, improve employee awareness, and reveal unnoticed problems. Take a different department each week of the month.  Your employees will welcome the added attention and your customers will only benefit from it. No matter what actions are found to be needed, if done in the name of making business better and improving customer satisfaction, you’ll reap the rewards. Customers will feel more comfortable and have a more enjoyable experience at your dealership. Encourage all of your employees to pretend that they are customers and to keep their eyes wide open – to take a better look at what is happening in their dealership. You’ll be amazed how different things look.