• Stop being a LURKER - join our dealer community and get involved. Sign up and start a conversation.

Oh no. I'm a customer.

Alex Snyder

President Skroob
Staff member
May 1, 2006
3,598
2,525
Awards
13
First Name
Alex
If one were to ask me what was the biggest life-changing event I’ve experienced I’m not sure I could say it was meeting my better half. Although she is certainly life changing, she wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for me becoming a customer.

I was born a car dealer. My Grandfather founded the family’s dealer group 15 years before I was born. His Grandfather founded the family’s department store 70 years before that, and he ran a retail establishment after earning his citizenship. Retailing has been the centerpiece of my family’s income for somewhere around 150 years. We would like to go further back, but there isn’t a lot of known history from our European days. From what we do know, we’ve been pretty good at it. I wasn’t just born into a dealership, I was born into a profitable business with all the wonderful perks. That’s right… “perks” = silver spoon in my mouth.

In 2010 I became a technologist. It turned me into a customer. I had to negotiate car deals and actually use a service department. For shame! Scheduling appointments, and all that consumer-grade garbage, was suddenly a practice I had to succumb to. Peasants ride in shuttle vans! I miss the D-tag that could be magnetized to the back of whatever fast car I liked that day. Dealership coffee? That’s for freeloaders!

I was a customer, a bottom-feeder. And wow, my eyes were opened.

The customer has no tools. I feel like a tool.

We lowly customers have to use the combination of a manufacturer and dealership websites to even get into the ballpark of what a lease payment might look like. Neither of those places are good at providing any more answers than what one could get out of those old printed brochures.

Trying to figure out how much a service is going to cost – ha! That’s a laugh.

What rates are available? Shoot, I’d settle for just seeing what banks a dealer might work with.

Can I add an accessory to my car? Sure doesn’t seem like I can with an OEM part.

As a consumer, I can only assume the car industry is not interested in us. It is interested in shoving us into the basement with an ample diet of gruel. This changes in the store. In the dealership I can get all the prices I want and ask all the questions I need answered.

That is not what I want. I want to do this on my time, on my device, inside my own online tool. I want my answers in your website. Your website is not for you dealers, it is mine!

In my opinion this is the biggest miss of all car dealers and manufacturers right now. Everyone seems too concentrated on fancy metrics and getting “smart” that you’re totally missing the fundamentals. Give the customer the information he or she needs to make a decision. Give us content!

Dealers, you do not need to wait for some technology vendor to do this for you. Just because you don’t have a DMS feed of your service prices does not mean you cannot have some basic service prices splattered on the service page. Specials are not the answer either.

If you have a fantastic payment presentation that you can customize for each customer (guess what, you do) then change your website’s calls to action to be “Get your Payment.” Send them a PDF of your worksheet. Yes, this is a little extra work, but it is what the customer wants.

What I’m saying is your website sucks. But you have all the power to fix it right now! Just get off your ass and do it. I guarantee the vendors will follow your lead and make it easier, but you need to figure out what your customers want first.

Read the whole post here.
 
Friggin Millennials... "I want.. I want... I want..." waaaa waaaa waaaa... tell it to Sweeny!

ahahahaha. Nice article Alex. You and I have had many a discussion on exactly how and why "this" happened the way it did.

At the end of the day... aren't the vendors really solving the problems their customers WANT solved? Another way to phrase that question: Does there exist a vested interest in NOT solving the problems you describe?
 
Give the customer the information he or she needs to make a decision.

@Alex Snyder, which customer decision are we chasing after here? Give enough info for a decision to pick up the phone or submit a form and contact the dealership? Enough info to make a decision to actually get in their car and physically visit the dealership? Or... enough information to equip the customer with rates, prices and payments to make a decision to actually cross shop your dealership?

Wheres the line for each of those decisions and how does a dealer identify that line with each customer???
 
I believe leads and phone calls are more opportunities for sales people to fuck up.

An example of giving the customer all the info:

You need a new TV. Your old one is giving you problems. Best Buy is literally a 15 - 20 min drive from your house. You've driven by or been inside that store numerous times. You go to their website. Theres a shopping cart on the site. TVs of every make, model, size and color. You can do everything on their website. Ratings and reviews galore about every TV. You can buy your new TV on their site without leaving your house and have it delivered if you choose!! A full and complete online retail process. You can even apply for credit and get an instant approval right then, online. You have every piece of information to make a decision. Every single piece. Most customers won't do it right then and there though!! They will open a new tab on their device and go directly to Amazon and cross shop Best Buy. Even though Best Buy gave them all the information and tools to make a decision and purchase the product right then, while on their website. They will still cross shop the pricing even with all the information and tools to make a decision and not contact Best Buy because they've been given all the information!!!

So as a GSM or GM, do you want info and tools on your site to be so called "Transparent" and give the customers all the information they need to make a decision or do you provide enough info and tools for the customer to physically contact you whether it be a form submission, call or an actual visit to the store.

I get what your saying about the hemorrhage of phone calls and leads. If the hemorrhage your speaking of is that bad then simply take all the forms off of the website along with the phone numbers and simply display the dealerships physical address!!
 
@Rick Buffkin you know I am a big fan of the way your mind works. You think of things a bit differently than the rest of us do, so getting your extra perspective is always valuable to me :thumbup:

In this case you might be comparing apples to oranges. The car sale is a completely different animal due to my emotional connection to my car. I don't feel the same way about my TV. It is basic human psychology, not franchise laws, that has kept the car dealer in business. This is also something I had to become a customer to figure out.

Here is a statement that might stop me from ever landing a job as a General Manager: if I were a car dealer, again, I would make my number 1 mission the elimination of leads and phone calls.

I would start by showing my sales and service inventories in the best possible light I could. I would price EVERYTHING (not just used cars) competitively. There sure as damn hell would be contractable-accurate retail & lease payments prominently shown on listings pages that included tax. Service would own over 50% of the content throughout my site. Accessories would be upsold everywhere. Soft adds too.

And I would take the biggest wrecking ball the world has ever seen to the walls between variable and fixed operations. Service writers would be excited to see a sales agent and sales would setup camp in the service drive. I would do this through payplans (no, I am not sharing how that would work….Alex's secret sauce).

I would keep credit applications on my website. I would implement Trade Pending and follow it up with an operational practice that promotes it. Marketing would be a lot like CarGurus' approach. The phone number would be present on the Contact Us page. But there would not be any pop ups requesting lead information and one of the few inventory calls to action would be to hold a car with a small deposit.

I would work my ass off to make my website answer as many questions as possible. My KPIs for success would start with the decreasing number of leads and phone calls. Of course profit would be the underlying score card.

Much of what I'd do cannot be done with the traditional automotive vendors. I'm a radical frikin bastard! Fortunately, I know some guys who are too ;)
 
@Alex Snyder, Brother... I'm with you!! I get it. A couple of things that come to mind though when you mention the customers emotional connections to cars. I know there is a connection there. It almost seems though, that connection isn't as strong as it once was with customers and their cars. Example is the subscription based ownership programs now that are popping up all over the country whether it be OEMs or 3rd party's. It's an easy process for the customers and, like you expressed, they can see all the information upfront. Personally, I think that market segment is gonna keep growing the more they can put payments inline with the masses budgets. That will force dealers to adapt. Currently in my market, we have competitors that offer these tools your speaking of. Carvana, Fair and OEMs that offer subscription ownership. It is getting tougher.

Ultimately... I personally think that dealers still haven't closed the gap with online to offline. There's still a huge disconnect there. Is it training? Is it management? It is technology? I don't know...
 
@Alex Snyder, Brother... I'm with you!! I get it. A couple of things that come to mind though when you mention the customers emotional connections to cars. I know there is a connection there. It almost seems though, that connection isn't as strong as it once was with customers and their cars. Example is the subscription based ownership programs now that are popping up all over the country whether it be OEMs or 3rd party's. It's an easy process for the customers and, like you expressed, they can see all the information upfront. Personally, I think that market segment is gonna keep growing the more they can put payments inline with the masses budgets. That will force dealers to adapt. Currently in my market, we have competitors that offer these tools your speaking of. Carvana, Fair and OEMs that offer subscription ownership. It is getting tougher.

Ultimately... I personally think that dealers still haven't closed the gap with online to offline. There's still a huge disconnect there. Is it training? Is it management? It is technology? I don't know...

True, there are some innovators getting notice. There always are. And there will always be 1% of the population that will buy a car sight-unseen as eBay has been proving for years. The subscription model is very interesting and soooooo fresh. Even @kevinfrye (who is the pioneering champion of it) claims the margins are razor thin. It will take some time for the first few dealers to figure out how to make a profit on it.

Personally, a vehicle subscription no longer appeals to me as a consumer. I need a pickup truck and am less concerned about discovering how good rubber can hang through a corner. I also have kids and no matter how loud I get they're a terror to the car. Maybe when we are empty-nesters and I've shed a few hobbies…. who knows.

All that aside, it is easy to get lost in on the tip of the spear at DealerRefresh. We're all forward-thinking entrepreneurs who aren't afraid to try something new. We are not the norm. We are the pioneers.

I agree that offline and online gaps are still gigantic. I blame the companies behind the technology. Many have found dealers easy prey and are getting quite fat on them. Some employ incredible "certification" costs as a way to stifle competition. Others acquire their way into a more comfortable marketplace. What they aren't doing is diving deep into the issues that create friction between customers and dealers. They tackle one side or the other. Few try to solve the issue for both. Digital Retailing is a perfect example of technology made for customers; not dealers.

I think the future is in a solution that bring dealers and customers closer together. The continued pursuit of building a $299 widget that gets more leads ain't the winning path.
 
I think the future is in a solution that bring dealers and customers closer together. The continued pursuit of building a $299 widget that gets more leads ain't the winning path.

I agree with you 10 million %. But, the game changing conversation to get the dealers to spend the funds required to adapt to a new process that we're speaking of isn't going to come from a industry consultant, a speaker at a convention, an internet manager or a person thats a forward thinker. I personally believe it will have to mandated and come from the OEMs forcing them to adapt. Once that happens, it will force everyone else to change and adapt as well. Including DMS providers, CRM companies and everything else that falls underneath it.