Viewing the Dealership Customer Experience from a Prospect’s Perspective

Are you unknowingly wasting your customers’ valuable time? Does the car-buying journey at your dealership feel more like an obstacle course than an enjoyable experience? Most importantly, is your team building meaningful connections with customers who interact with your dealership online and in-store?

From the initial showroom greeting to the final service appointment, every touchpoint matters in shaping your dealership’s reputation.

In this blog post, we’ll flip the script by viewing the dealership customer experience through the buyers’ eyes and answering key questions to help improve your dealership’s customer satisfaction scores including:

● Do we know who our customers are and understand what they want?

● Are we proactively tailoring the buying journey to their individual needs and wants?

● How do we ensure we’ve created a frictionless dealership experience?

Who Are Your Dealership’s Customers? What Do They Want?

How much do you know about your customers when they arrive at your showroom for the first time, and what insights do you have about what they want to buy and how much they can spend? Answering these foundational questions correctly is key to creating an exceptional dealership customer experience from the very first touchpoint.

Fortunately, it’s especially easy to know who your customers is and exactly what they want with predictive marketing technology.

For example, Mastermind enables dealers to easily identify prospective customers. Our proprietary algorithm provides a unique and incredibly accurate Behavior Prediction Score^® (BPS) that ranks buyers on a scale of 0 to 100 based on how likely they are to buy, taking the guesswork out of your dealership’s marketing strategy.

Proactively Meeting Customer Needs to Provide a Positive Customer Experience (CX)

Of course, dealers need to not only engage the right customers – buyers also want the right deal, at the right time. 

As prices and rates remain high, customers are putting a greater emphasis on pricing. In a 2023 Global Automotive Consumer Study, 57% of U.S. customers ranked getting a good deal as the most important aspect of the purchase experience. Meaning, it’s more important than ever that dealers engage buyers with personalized and transparent offers – tailored to their unique financial needs.

Mastermind enables dealers to automatically engage their best prospective buyers with relevant and timely offers that address each customer’s  unique situation. From here, Mastermind’s Behavior Prediction Drivers^® provide dealership sales teams with actionable insights and personalized selling points to meet each buyer’s  specific wants and needs.

What Makes Customers Happy?

While product, brand, and price still typically drive a buyer’ s purchasing decisions, the dealership customer experience, or CX, is still driven by how a buyer feels about their experience.

Dealership CX impacts more than your customer satisfaction scores – it can significantly influence a dealership’s bottom line. While a great CX lets you operate at a price premium, a bad customer experience loses you customers altogether.

 According to PwC, 43 percent of consumers would pay more for greater convenience and 42 percent would pay more for a “friendly and welcoming” experience. Meanwhile, one in three consumers will walk away from a brand they’d previously loved after just one bad experience.

No matter how much you’ve worked to build years of loyalty and how much you’ve spent on fancy waiting room amenities, you can lose those investments in a minute if a customer feels they have been treated poorly.

Building Dealership Trust

The best way to build dealership trust and ensure that doesn’t happen is to make sure every touchpoint with your customers is as personalized and efficient as possible.

If you look at your dealership from a customer’s perspective, is the dealership staff you’re interacting with able to do what you need them to do? If not, why?

Make sure everyone who touches the customer has access to all the information and insights they need and is empowered to meet their needs on the spot.

Creating a Frictionless Customer Experience

PwC’s deep research into CX concludes that, “People are increasingly loyal to the retailers, products, brands and devices that consistently provide exceptional value with minimum friction or stress.”

As customers are increasingly looking for faster, more efficient customer experiences, dealers need to proactively identify opportunities to simplify the buying process.

Proactively Identify Areas of Improvement

For example, from a customer experience perspective, the negotiation and finance & insurance (F&I) processes are ripe for improvement. Ward’s Automotive notes that the F&I process consistently ranks among the top complaints on dealership customer satisfaction surveys.

One way some dealers have tried to speed this process along is by having salespeople handle F&I responsibilities in the showroom, which is a move that also offers cost savings by decreasing the need for F&I staff.

But this strategy risks making a common CX challenge: putting too much on the sales team’s shoulders by removing F&I experts from the transaction.

Instead of transferring F&I responsibilities to showroom salespeople, dealers should instead focus on improving the coordination between sales and F&I teams to make the process move more quickly and smoothly.

Improving Your Dealership Customer Experience

Mastermind helps improve the dealership customer experience by ensuring both sales and F&I staff have access and are working from the same information and insights about the customer. This reduces the need for repetitive information collection in the F&I room, improves the seamlessness of the handover from sales, and makes it easier for everyone on the dealership team to provide consistently great CX.

Improve Dealership CX with Mastermind

If you approach the car-buying process from a customer’s perspective, would the experience you’d have in your dealership make you happy? Are your people ready and able to get you in and out as quickly and painlessly as possible?

If not, contact us to schedule a free consultation on how Mastermind’s solutions could help you make the connections your customers want.