Auto Dealers, I invite you to read what Doug Stephens, Founder, and President of Retail Prophet has to say about customer experience design. He writes in an Op-ed piece for London-based “Business of Fashion” that most customer experience design is just fresh icing on the same stale cake.
When dealers remodel their showroom, add some iPads and give their employees hospitality training they are doing very little to re-engineer the customer experience. As Doug Stephens says it’s just Fresh Icing…
Unless you are eliminating friction and reducing the time it takes to sell a car by employing a one-price business model you are probably just adding “fresh icing” to a way of selling a car that continues to frustrate auto shoppers. Do iPads and marble floors actually change the experience for your customers? Are you increasing transparency and reducing anxiety with these expensive, yet superficial improvements? Are you still running 10 lanes of sales traffic into 3 lanes of F&I capability?
Unless you have a new recruiting strategy backed by a compensation model that addresses today’s young workforce you are not re-engineering the customer experience. To deliver the experience of the future you will need to recruit, train, nurture and retain the worker of the future. Millennials value meaning, demand work-life balance and prefer a stable, non-commission pay plan. They are looking for a career path, not just a job. Scoff all you want. I know it’s not how you and I were raised but this is a new reality and it’s not going away. Young workers (our future) don’t want to negotiate with their friends and neighbors over the profit in a car sale.
Beautiful facilities enhance shopping for a vehicle. iPads can facilitate communication. Every interaction between an employee and guest is better when it is handled with civility and grace. But, until we re-engineer the decades-old mechanics of buying a car significant advances in customer experience are going to be elusive.
Read Doug Stephen’s entire article here.
If you are curious about making the journey to one-price selling and single point of contact, Ryan Adams Group is here to help.
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