Auto dealers are well known for their huge support to local communities. Especially around the holiday season when they do many good deeds including toy drives, donations to food banks and a variety of other activities that have special meaning to those particular dealers. It’s noble not to “brag” about the great things we do[…]
What would you do if a customer was injured at your dealership and you were at fault? I don’t mean serious injury or anything like that. Perhaps just a bump or scrape? Most businesses would apologize or, at the very least acknowledge the mishap to the customer. Perhaps send some flowers or a gift card.[…]
Customer feedback is important to any business’ growth. That’s why many send out customer satisfaction surveys and managers pay attention to that feedback. However, sometimes the feedback system is faulty or gets misinterpreted to the point of being useless. Take the feedback system Uber used to have. At the end of each trip riders were[…]
In their new book, The Intuitive Customer, authors Colin Shaw and Ryan Hamilton contend that companies that try to fight declining customer satisfaction by lowering prices are going about customer satisfaction the wrong way. Instead, they state that the magic to winning customer loyalty is based on understanding what the customer will do next. An article in MediaPost,[…]
The automotive industry has a sales department staffing problem – and a big one. In fact, NADA has placed the yearly turnover rate as high as 70 percent. Dealerships are in constant hiring mode to keep their sales floor staffed with enough employees to provide coverage for their floor traffic and to follow up with[…]
As technology has caused a significant shift in consumer interactions and desires, retailers have to follow suit in order to retain the consumers’ business. Customer loyalty is an increasingly fickle thing. And, as convenience has become so easily attainable for today’s consumers, some retailers believe that the only competitive arena left is price. However, this[…]
As Henry Ford stated, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Technology changes in our industry faster than many of us can keep up with. It seems like new services and innovations pop up weekly. Do we know which innovations consumers are sure to like or not? Of[…]
Humans naturally crave interaction with other humans. However, as technology advances, there is an increasing push by companies to automate as much of their processes as possible. While this is understandable, as it saves on costs, the path technology is taking us down could prove to be a double-edged sword. Think about all the automated[…]
How many loyalty cards do you have in your wallet? The average U.S. household now belongs to more than 18 loyalty programs, for a total of more than 2 billion memberships. That’s an awful lot of loyal customers, but as it turns out, all these programs and cards are having an unintended effect: customer loyalty fatigue.[…]
There’s a big push in our industry right now to bring as much of the car buying process online as possible. Startups are entering the space believing that consumers want this ability and automotive vendors of all sizes are creating products to facilitate that. However, some dealers are afraid to adopt these solutions for fear[…]