The Client –
This case study is on a car dealership group who has numerous dealerships for new and used cars.
This dealership group has been around for a very long time and they are very big on providing their customers with exceptional customer service. They have been conducting mystery shopping visits on their new car dealerships previously but had not done any undercover customer visits on their pre-owned dealerships.
Problem –
The owner of the dealership felt that their sales consultants were not carrying out specific customer service KPIs that they were meant to do for their potential customers. They also wanted to have insights on what the level of customer service was in this section of their dealership.
Strategy –
The plan was to make physical mystery customer visits to specific pre-owned dealerships with the possible intention of purchasing a pre-owned vehicle and also assessing the various points of the customer service that was provided.
Process –
A physical site visit with a specific scenario was made to the various used car dealerships. KPIs relating to customer service and the process of selling a car were focused on and scored to allow for easy assessment of what was working well and what needed to be worked on.
Discovery –
63% of the car dealerships visited achieved scores under 50% and 2% achieved scores in the 60% in their overall performance. Only 13% achieved a score of over 80% in this category.
We identified that some of the dealerships were not very interested in providing exceptional customer service unless they were certain that the vehicle was going to be purchased on that day.
The other commonality amongst all the dealerships was that consultants were not taking the prospective customer out for a test drive which was an important KPI for this dealership. This meant that it would not allow the consultant to discuss features and benefits that could potentially move the customer to excitement and possibly a sale.
Trial Closes and Closes were other important customer service KPIs that were majorly lacking. Majority of the consultants were not doing Follow Ups as they were not recording any contact details.
Payoff –
The training areas were identified for this organization to act on to improve in this area. Improvement would lead to providing potential customers better customer service which could lead to an increase in sales.
The Praise – “I’m very impressed with your work and your findings and I would like to continue”