The Importance of the Dealership Service Drive in the Customer Relationship

January 17, 2020

An increasing number of dealers understand the service drive is a critically important place to start customer relationships and nurture them. They’re integrating predictive analytics into fixed ops and championing the importance of the service drive in their customer relationship culture accordingly, and the results are proving the value of that investment. In fact, service and parts operations account for 16.2% of new-car dealership net profit on average.

In this post, Mastermind shares best practices for incorporating the dealership service drive in the customer relationship by:

Identifying the Best Service Prospects

Every dealer knows service reminders for loyalty customers and service-not-sold prospects drive service revenues and can help build relationships for eventual loyalty sales. Modern predictive analytics and personalized marketing solutions can take both public and proprietary data about individuals in your service market radius and precisely target potentially excellent service conquest customers.

What might this look like? Consider the intersection of the changes in where Americans live and what we drive. Nearly four out of every 10 Americans expect to move to a new residence within the next five years. Relatedly, only slightly more than half of all adult Americans have lived in the same state all their lives.

Meanwhile, North American auto sales are flat and expected to remain so for the foreseeable future, and consumers are hanging onto their cars for almost 12 years.

The result of these two intersecting trends is an increasingly large contingent of built-in conquest prospects who are moving into new homes more frequently than they’re buying new cars and are moving further than the 10-mile maximum most consumers are willing to travel for vehicle service visits.

Through predictive analytics and personalized marketing, dealers can target new residents to their community with personalized service offers, bringing even those who intend to hold onto their car for years to come into the dealership through the service bay and beginning to build a relationship based on that personalized starting point.

Improving the Dealership Service Customer Experience

It’s not news to dealers that customers don’t want to spend time waiting for their cars to be repaired. Customer experience research from PwC and other experts show that not only are customers increasingly ready to walk away after just one bad experience, but they’re also getting less patient with their time being wasted with inefficiencies. The reality of the auto service experience is that you’re constantly at risk of doing damage to customer relationships with surprise costs, unpleasant decisions or unexpectedly long waits. To combat this, your team needs to have every piece of information, all the training and all authority to make customers happy and get them back on the road as quickly as possible.

The good news is if you’re successful at providing a pleasant automotive service experience, your customers will reward you. According to PwC, roughly four out of every 10 American consumers are willing to pay more for greater convenience or a “friendly and welcoming” experience.

This is how a great service drive customer experience pays dividends in two ways: It helps you run a more profitable service drive up front, and then it helps you convert both loyalty and service-not-sold customers into new sales when the data and analytics tell you the time is right.

Convert Service into Sales

Every successful service-not-sold conquest makes a meaningful difference in the bottom line thanks to its built-in ROI: It’s generally five times cheaper than traditional marketing and sales methods.

Effective service conquest starts with attracting those customers and then providing the personalized customer experience that makes them want to keep coming back. At some point, your sales team needs to know when the service drive customer is turning into a quality sales prospect. This is where a dealership sales platform such as Market EyeQ truly makes a difference.

Market EyeQ integrates your own data from your DMS with TransUnion, Carfax, IHS Markit and other public and proprietary data sources to quickly and efficiently highlight the best service-not-sold conquest prospects in your service drive. It then ranks them on a simple 0-100 scale through Mastermind’s Behavior Prediction Score, letting your sales team prioritize the best prospects – and avoid the ones that aren’t a fit.

The result is that when Market EyeQ is fully integrated into a dealership, our dealer partners report activating 55 percent of service-not-sold customers into qualified, in-market new vehicle sales leads. That’s the power of predictive analytics, of personalized marketing, of great customer experience…and of the service drive being the engine for sales growth your dealership needs in a challenging marketplace.

Are you ready to elevate the service drive’s importance in your relationship with your customers? To learn how Mastermind’s predictive analytics, personalized marketing and MarketEyeQ sales platform can give you the advantages you need, contact us to schedule a demo today.