Turning Service Customers Into Sales With Trade In Values

[ryanlucia]

Quick question to my DR folks. I just started at Black Book as a data licensing manager couple weeks ago and I think I have an idea that not many people are doing and wanted your opinions. My job is to come up with creative idea's for companies to use our data.

The Idea (I'm not the first to think of this but want your opinions)
Service customer comes to your service department has a $600 ticket. Service presents the ticket to the customer with a buy back option that waives the service charge. The invoice or ticket would have a range for what their car is worth if fixed using trade in values rough to average. Of course sales bills into the deal the service charge and gets trade ins that just ran through the service department.

Again forgive me if this is elementary and this has been going on for years.

What are your thoughts? Are you doing this? Is it successful?

 

[JoeyD]

Forgive my short post, but we began doing this last year at our Honda store and it's been a pretty successful program and the GM's NADA peers were impressed, but might I add that eLead has a similar product alerting you to service drive equity, so I doubt it's a hidden gem just perhaps a little under utilized.

 

[nevarlawae]

Yeah, this works, we did it at a dealership and would put a check for, lets say, $10k on the dashboard. Obviously it would be a check for the trade-in value. Got a lot of people to come to the sales floor that never would have before. If they are a past customer getting their car serviced then a their sales guy should be greeting them and giving them these options anyway.

 

[ryanlucia]

Forgive my ignorance but do service departments use a CRM? What do they typically use for follow up and keep track of appointments? I have implemented CRM's at dealerships and never had the service department involved in the process. Not up to date on the service side of things.

 

[JoeyD]

It depends, but typically from what I've seen it's difficult for some dealers to realize the importance of the CRM in Service vs Sales. But at my dealership we use ADP for everything Service related. Our CRM, eLead CRM, does have a Service CRM option but we're not subscribed, therefore it only shows appointment information. All of our Service customers can be found in eLead though because it pulls from ADP.