The automotive industry can be extremely competitive as car dealers try to successfully secure new clients while ensuring previous customers remain loyal. How can dealerships, though, improve their reputation and increase their customer base in the automotive industry? Providing excellent customer experience is key, and it is more important than ever that there be no room for complacency.

Like any other business, dealerships must deliver the whole package. After all, if you want clients to come back for more, the entire customer journey counts, not just the end result.

So, what makes excellent customer service?

The Buyer’s Journey

Before you start exploring techniques to improve overall customer satisfaction, your sales team must look at the car buyer’s journey. The buyer’s journey can be broken down into these three easy-to-understand stages:

• Awareness – In this stage, the customer acknowledges they have a need, whether it be finding a new vehicle, acquiring financing to buy a vehicle, or service to maintain their current vehicle. Once a customer identifies that they have a need, they will naturally look for a solution.
• Consideration – Searching for a solution, the customer has moved to the consideration stage where they examine the odds to see whether it would be more cost and time-effective for them to provide the solution themselves or better to seek assistance from a business (i.e. a car dealership).
• Decision – When the buyer or customer has come to the verdict that their need will best be met with assistance, the buyer’s journey has moved to the decision stage where they will then determine which business to use. Your dealership aims to get the customer to choose your business.

Of course, you want the customer to choose your dealership. That is the end result. As noted earlier, however, to get to that result and ensure excellent customer service, your dealership must look at each stage of the buyer’s journey and deliver its full potential throughout each stage to truly improve customer satisfaction. The better the customer service is throughout each stage of the customer journey the higher the chance that the decision-making stage will result in the customer choosing your business.

Prioritize the customer

Customers want to feel as if they are your priority and not simply just another dollar sign to a business. Your dealership’s sales and service teams must focus on your business mission with the mentality to provide a solution for each customer.

Rather than focusing on the hard sell by pushing a particular product or service onto a customer, try advising customers by creating a nurturing relationship with the customer that builds their trust. There are many ways to forge this business-customer relationship which you can easily do by following these steps:

• Never mislead a customer — Despite living in a digital age, word of mouth continues to be an effective marketing technique. People talk, and if you provide incorrect information or promise unrealistic results, this could prove detrimental to your reputation in the future. Be 100 percent truthful at all times, even if that means you are not getting that specific sale or job. The customer will value your honesty and will be more likely to return to you for future work.
• Build trust – Be transparent to customers so they can trust your business. Do this by incorporating comments, reviews, and testimonials into your marketing platforms, like on your website. Remember to also always speak the customer’s language when building trust. Answer all their questions without sounding patronizing as well as learn to recognize when a customer needs complex terms broken down to ensure they feel supported and educated, rather than confused and overwhelmed.
• Create professional multi-channel marketing touchpoints – With everything seeming to go digital, your dealership must create professional multi-channel marketing touchpoints. From your website to social media, make sure each of your marketing platforms looks professional and sleek while serving its purpose to connect with your customers.
• Upgrade your digital channels – With the growth of technology, auto dealerships have to adapt their marketing techniques by providing a premium digital experience to customers. Utilize features like the Video for Sales app. Created specifically with the automotive industry in mind, this app offers a range of features that facilitate in creating a virtual shopping experience on digital platforms that is customer-friendly.
• Streamline the process – Make it your mission as a dealership to be customer-focused by reducing the amount of people they deal with. This will in turn enable you to sell your models or services quickly, overall helping satisfy the customer.

Use Video for Sales to Improve Customer Satisfaction

Sending your prospects and customers video at each stage of the buying journey and ownership lifecycle can make a huge difference in improving customer satisfaction. While taking this approach to focus on the customer’s experience rather than to hard sell your product or service might seem unnatural at first, this soft approach of creating a satisfying customer-dealership relationship built on reliability offers you a better chance of the customer coming to you for a solution at the end. Remember that one of the best ways to forge a connection with customers is through digital channels, but with a human and personalized touch, at which video excels.

If you’re in the automotive industry looking to improve your customer service with forward-thinking technologies and marketing strategies, it can sometimes feel overwhelming as to where to start. Video for Sales is the leading automotive video tool, helping dealers enhance the customer experience while maximizing sales. Arrange a Video for Sales demo today.