Group 1 has announced it has an order bank here in the UK of 16,000 units, predominantly in the luxury sector with brands ranging from Audi to BMW and Jaguar Land Rover to Mercedes-Benz.
Some 16,000 customers waiting for a new car to arrive across around 30 or so luxury dealers will mean each site will have around 500 customers to manage between order and handover. Even if it was across the entire group’s 70 or sites, each site would be looking at more than 200 customers to manage while more and more are being added to the list.
How does any business behave in a proactive way with a queue of customers (who have already paid a deposit) snaking down the road and out of sight?
Some will close their eyes and hope for the best. Others will do what they can with the resource they have but it’s an overwhelming situation and even the most diligent sales teams will know full well that any effort they place into managing those customers, handling their legitimate concerns and questions, will be a drop in the ocean and distract them from the job at hand: Take more orders.
Simply put, it’s an impossible situation to manage let alone turn into a positive.
Will new vehicle supply correct itself in the next month or two? If it doesn’t, this is a situation that will be increasingly troublesome to handle because it’s the one area of the customer journey in automotive that no-one truly owns. That’s been the case forever.
The best possible solution here is to onboard another 100 top performing sales executives and build a new wing of the customer service call centre. Neither are viable.
Technology should not replace, but it should enhance and mitigate risk. In this case, one that most dealer groups will find themselves in, the opportunity exists to give every single customer waiting for a new car to arrive access to a personalised and localised customer journey – a journey within the overall buyer journey.
Not only should that technology be able to keep every customer updated on their wait time, it should excite and leverage the feeling that every buyer has in that very specific stage of the buying journey – the anticipation that something will be landing soon.
Contact with customers should only escalate to the sales team when a customer is in danger of falling out of love with the retailer, or there is an opportunity to increase value, ie sell an accessory, sport pack or service plan. Again, technology can enable this.
Going back to the example of Group 1, where the business has done incredibly well to create an order bank of 16,000 cars, it shouldn’t be seen as a ‘problem’. They need to be seen as an opportunity, and the only way this can happen is with data.
Automate content to each customer and suddenly at site level the 500-customer order to handover problem becomes something very different.
It becomes more like:
150 actively engaging with accessories
200 actively engaging with service plans
50 actively engaging with paint protection
75 opening content and engaging but not with anything specific
25 are not engaging and could be at risk of dropping out
Far more manageable with less cost associated. More chance of upsell, less chance of deals falling out and customer satisfaction level across the board increase as a result.
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