Did you know customer satisfaction is directly tied to retention and loyalty? Think about it… If you’re providing an exceptional customer experience, then your customers are more likely to return to your dealership for future vehicle needs. If they feel they did not receive the level of service they desired, then chances are they will not return and in fact, statistics show they will tell nine to 15 people about their “horrible” experience. How do you truly know if your customers are happy with their experience? How do you know if they like and trust their service advisor or sales associate? How do you know if they will return to your dealership and refer their family and friends?
We all know manufacturers are concerned with customer satisfaction. They typically send out a survey after each new vehicle purchase or warranty service performed. They’re checking to ensure the level of service is being met by your dealership, you’re upholding their brand integrity, and you are following the policies and procedures they’ve put in place. Surveying really is the only way to check and triple check that customers are truly having a positive ownership experience.
Think about instituting a survey program in your dealership. It is an economical and efficient way to measure customer satisfaction. Plus, it allows you to make sure the practices, procedures, and policies you’ve put in place are being delivered by your staff. Also, it gives you the opportunity to address any problems before they escalate and affect other’s opinions of your dealership.
Customize Your Message
When beginning your survey, you will first want to decide if you want to survey your new purchase customers, service customers, or both. Once you’ve determined your audience, think about what type of questions you will ask to understand customer satisfaction. You may want to ask about the ease of scheduling an appointment, the friendliness and helpfulness of your staff, if their vehicle was ready at the promised time, how well service maintenance needs were explained to them, or if their sales person was knowledgeable about their vehicle’s options. The sky is the limit here, so really dig deep and consider how best to uncover customer satisfaction. If we had to recommend a couple of questions to ask, they would be: would customers recommend your dealership to their family and friends, will they return for future vehicle needs, or have they purchased or serviced at your dealership in the past.
Decide on Question Type
You will also want to determine what type of question will resonate with your customers. Sometimes, comment questions, where a customer can fill in their own answers, are not always the most time efficient and could potentially result in less surveys being completed. These types of comment questions can also be hard to decipher and may leave you with more ambiguity than fact. We recommend keeping these questions to a minimum. You could try sliding scale questions, where you ask what their satisfaction is with a particular part of your business on a scale from one to five, or one to 10. These questions leave less room for interpretation and allow customers to grade your service more accurately. The easiest questions for your customers to fill out are yes/no questions, plus they give you a black and white view of the services being offered at your dealership.
Determine Delivery Method
In today’s technology world, there are several delivery options for your dealership’s survey. You could opt for a phone method, where a live person or a recorded machine calls each customer to determine their level of satisfaction, or if you have a big enough budget, you could deliver a personalized survey to each customer by way of direct mail. If you employ this method, be sure to account for an extra self-addressed stamped envelope so customers have a way of getting the survey back to you. The most cost effective delivery method is an electronic survey, delivered through email. If you decide on this delivery method, be sure your staff is actively collecting email addresses so you can reach out to customers.
Measure Your Results
Once you’ve determined your survey content, what type of questions you’ll ask, and how you will get the survey in front of customers to capture customer satisfaction, it’s time to sit back and watch the responses come in. After you’ve collected responses for about a month, you’ll want to aggregate answers so you can determine if there are any trends that are positively or negatively impacting customer satisfaction. It may be important to link your survey data to your DMS data so you can identify if there are specific causes to low customer satisfaction, such as a specific sales or service staff member or your online scheduling method.
If you’re looking to increase customer retention and provide an exceptional purchase and ownership experience, then turn to a survey tool that can truly measure your customer’s responses to their most recent visit to your store. By improving the customer experience at your store, you’ll gain greater loyalty and a competitive advantage to ensure each and every customer comes back to you for future vehicle needs.
OneCommand offers a solution that surveys customers and measures their satisfaction with your dealership. Dealer Review is available today and leverages the power of OneCommand’s Customer Marketing and Loyalty Automation Platform™ to deliver these surveys at key points in your customers buying or servicing cycles. OneCommand’s survey solution ensures you receive real-time feedback you can act on to positively affect CSI ratings. Contact us today to learn more!