Emails struggling but telephone contact is really working at the moment.

There is light at the end of the tunnel, but it seems a long way off at the moment. I don’t think any of us are expecting a quick return for car sales.

We have found a couple of things that really seem to help –

Email contact is still slow to bring in results. The emails are reaching their target, but unfortunately, they are mixed in with a whole host of emails / junk mail as every company fights for attention.

But telephone contact seems to be really working, the conversations are much longer as people like to talk to someone new and customers have concerns about coming into dealerships that need explaining individually.

We have found over the last few weeks a couple of things that really seem to help. It’s obvious but the answer is communication. Let the potential customer have full details of how they ‘should’ behave when they visit you. There seems to be just as much concern about arriving on site and doing the right thing as there is about visiting in the first place. Customers don’t seem to like the idea of having to ask, ‘what do I do now?”.

• Tell them in advance where they should go and how they will be met in all email and marketing material. Don’t just leave it up to showroom signage.
• Tell them about your one-way system, one way in and one way out.
• Tell them about your screens and the small steps you have taken for their safety at each point of contact with a member of your team.
• Are you providing face masks, or do they have to bring their own?
• If its aftersales, are you putting their keys in a sanitised bag?
• How will they pay? – they don’t like pressing card machines. Do they know you are taking card payments over the phone?

I appreciate that all this sounds pretty common sense. But this is the feedback we are getting while making service booking calls for retailers that decided to keep staff on furlough.

The really good news is that the conversion ratio for bookings is higher than normal!

It will be a number of months before the world starts to look normal again, but from the conversations we have had, customers are looking (sounding) positive. They just need to be told exactly what the dealership is going to do and what they need to do should they visit your showroom.

As one retailer put it, “we are safer than going to Sainsbury’s”.

You just need to make sure your customers, both Aftersales and Sales, know this.