How To Attract & Sell The Millennial Car Buyer – PART 16

How To Attract & Sell The Millennial Car Buyer (PART 16)

TRANSCRIPT: When I talk about this service scheduling thing, think about your online scheduling apps. They’ve got to be simple. They’ve got to be intuitive. They’ve got to make sense. They’ve got to be easy to do. Look at this one form, the one that’s closest to the advisor here that’s on the left. They’re asking for three phone numbers. Three phone numbers. I haven’t had three phone numbers, I don’t know, in 10 years. I can’t remember the last time I had a work phone, a home phone, and a cell phone. I haven’t had a home phone in a very, very long time and this is a required field. Your forms are requiring too much information. I cannot schedule service online.

Conversely, the one on the right is a much better form. This shortcut is welcomed by your connected customers. See many of you are creating artificial hurdles before you ever get a chance to meet the customer. There are only two things that can happen when I run into a form like this when I cannot schedule service online. Neither one are very good for you.

The first one’s okay for you and that is I’m going to pick up the phone and call your service team. Chances are if they can’t pay attention to a form they’re probably not answering their phones, are they? I’m going to have a bad experience with you trying to call you. What’s going to happen more often than that is I’m just going to abandon your website and I’m going to schedule my service somewhere else. I know I’ve done that, okay. You’re creating these artificial hurdles, you’ve never even had a chance to meet me. Ask yourself this, why is it easier for my customers to book a $10,000 cruise online than it is for them to schedule an oil change with me? That’s the reality for most dealerships today.

All right number two. We’re going to talk about BDCs and advisors and we’re talking about wowing our customers. I want you to understand, how can we wow our customers if our advisors with their bad moods and their poor customer service skills, if they’re the ones that are dealing with our customers when they’re scheduling service? See BDCs just flat out treat customers better plus advisors have more important tasks. They really do. This is not a beat up advisor day. It really isn’t. The reason that they can’t do the job of a receptionist is because they’re not a receptionist.

Who sets the appointments at your doctor’s office? Does your doctor set the appointment? No. Does his nurse, the nurse practitioner who’s in the room with you, do they set the appointment? No. It’s a receptionist. It’s a receptionist who sets the appointments. This is what customers expect. They don’t mind talking to a BDC agent. They really don’t. You’re not diagnosing service problems over the phone anyway. You’re scheduling appointments. One goal, having a one goal strategy throughout in your service scheduling is to wow them at each step. You also want an appointment that shows on time and your service advisors are going to have issues making that happen. All right.






Part three or the third step here before they ever get a chance to meet us is you need to have more pricing transparency. If you want more appointments with more customers willing to spend more with you, where it’s possible post your prices. This builds trust. Plus, you’re doing an MPI right? Multi point inspection with every oil change, with every tire rotation, with every muffler job you do. Why would you gouge on maintenance? Your maintenance prices should be in line with the rest of your market. You should be doing your oil changes for the same price as Jiffy Lube.

There’s no excuse not to do it because you can discover warranty work in your MPI. You can discover customer pay. There’s all sorts of things that you can work on that you get a shot at because you got their oil change. By the way, you don’t have to be exactly the same price as Jiffy Lube.

GFK did a survey. They tell us consumers are willing to pay 10 to 15% more at dealerships than at independent shops for more complicated repairs. People expect to pay a little more with you. They’re okay with that, but they think you’re going to gouge them. Let’s post our prices everywhere we can in the shop, online. That pricing transparency is good for you today.

All right, number four. Let’s talk about when we greet our guests. This is where you have your first face-to-face and your chance to really, really wow them. I have to ask you, because I’ve been in dealerships I get this look, you do want customers in your service department right? Right? In fact, you’d prefer that customers set and keep appointments with you in the service department, right, so you plan out your day. Then you got to ask yourself, why are we treating our customers like crap when they arrive?

Let’s look at the typical realities of a typical dealership service visit. I know this because this was my last visit and my visit before that and my visit before that, and almost every visit I’ve ever made to the dealership service drive.

First, when we greet our customers. Customers when they arrive at our dealership they got to get out of their car and approach an advisor, don’t they? Is that what happens at Jiffy Lube? No. Somebody comes outside and comes to the customer’s car. You don’t have to get out of your car and go find someone to help you at Jiffy Lube.

How about this? I get out of my car. I walk over to the advisors and all of the advisors have their heads down and they won’t make eye contact. I don’t know which desk to go. When a customer does talk to an advisor and says they have an appointment, the advisor looks at them like they have three heads. This has happened to me. People look at me like I’m crazy. “What do you mean you have an appointment? I can’t find the appointment.” Nobody’s lying to you. Take their word for it.

We need to expect customers, right? We need to expect them into our dealership. We need to greet our customers. We need to believe customers when they say have an appointment even if we can’t find it in our system. We need to make it simple for the connected customer. The connected customer is here for us, right? No, they’re not. We are here for the connected customer. They’re not here for you.

That brings us to building confidence, number five. This is the most important part. When you act like you don’t know me, when you don’t know anything about me, when you don’t know anything that I’ve already told you online about my issue, you’re losing your chance to sell me additional services because I’m not confident with you.

See there’s a good chance if we’re doing an MPI, there’s a good chance we’re going to find something in the MPI, in the multi point inspection. Then why do advisors destroy a new customer’s confidence in your dealership during your very first meeting? Asking clarifying questions are okay, but anything more frustrates the customer and hurts your credibility.

I’ve had this happen. I’ve spent 20 minutes online building a service visit with dealerships only to get to the dealership and have to reexplain everything that I wrote down as if I had never written it down. More than that, they weren’t expecting me. More than that, they acted like I was putting them out by wanting to do a transmission job on a Tuesday or whatever. Okay.

Think about this. New or infrequent customers are expecting a high priced hassle from you. We understand that. That’s what people expect from dealerships. They expect it to be higher priced. They expect it to be a hassle. If you seem incompetent from the beginning or if you waste their time you are starting in a deeper hole. If you want to sell me an additional service after the MPI, then you have to build confidence at the beginning, so knowing my name, expecting me, understanding my issues, and making people feel welcome. All of those things build confidence.