How Large Russian Car Dealers Communicate with Clients

[ashammi258]

No connections will help make the foot small, the soul big, and the heart fair.

© Evgeniy Schwartz

And the return on advertising analytics is effective if the customer service schemes themselves are weak - at the level of work processes and professionalism of employees. The CoMagic team conducts systematic research on how companies in a particular industry communicate with clients. To know their problem areas and provide recommendations for improving the work of our clients in the same profile.

In August 2016, we reached the auto industry — or rather, china phone numbers major Russian auto dealers*. We called 150 of them and pretended that we wanted to urgently buy a new car — without any loans or installments, right away. The only condition was that a test drive was needed first. That's what our agent employees signed up for. And then they disappeared from the radar of the car dealership managers and didn't show up. And they called the dealership again after that.

How did the communication between potential clients and car dealers go? Were they reminded about the test drive? Did they call them back? In short, what problems in customer service were identified? This is discussed further in the results of the study.


Prelude: Before the first words are spoken
So, our employees dialed the car dealership's phone number. What about the technical part - the quality of the connection and the virtual telephony functions used?

Voice greetings (with or without an interactive menu) are used by 82% of companies, 18% pick up the phone after the traditional beep.

At the same time, 29% of companies manage to start a conversation with an operator within 10 seconds. In most cases - 39% - the connection wait time is from 10 to 20 seconds. And 6% of companies make potential clients "hang on the line" for more than a minute, greatly risking losing the target call.


Conversation with a sales manager: the substantive part
The conversation with the car dealership has finally begun. But how does it actually happen? What have you managed to find out about the peculiarities of communication between a potential client and the average manager of a Russian car dealership?

The overwhelming majority of sales managers – 88% – do not forget to ask the client to introduce themselves.
88% of managers confidently answer questions from potential buyers about the availability, cost and configuration of a car.
66% of managers offer an alternative option if a car with the required configuration is not available.
67% of managers do not burden the client with unnecessary options and make a clear offer based on the client’s needs.
29% of clients ask the client about their budget for a car.
82% of sales managers suggest visiting a car dealership.
58% of sales managers provide information about promotions and special offers.
25% of managers decide to identify the reasons for the doubts of a client who takes time “to think”.
Only 35% of managers managed to convince the client that this particular price for the car was justified.
Only 80% of managers clearly set the time for the test drive.
84% of managers recorded potential client contacts.
However, only 53% of managers offered to record their own phone number.
Reminding about an upcoming test drive via SMS was offered in 70% of cases.

Conversation with a sales manager: speech technique
There is little doubt that when talking to a sales manager, it is not only what is said that is important, but also how it is said.

68% of managers do not limit the client in expressing their wishes and use active listening techniques.
70% of managers do not use potentially controversial judgments and denials in their speech.
84% of managers confidently conduct a dialogue, occupying a leading position in it, and do not allow pauses in the conversation.
The situation with parasitic words is slightly worse. 76% of managers do not use such and, say, diminutive suffixes.
However, we must give credit to the ability of car dealership managers to focus on the subject of conversation - only 9% of them jump from topic to topic.

When the client is lost: test drive test drive skip
So, CoMagic employees signed up for a test drive, but didn't show up. How did the dealership react?

Managers decided to call back and ask why the client missed the appointment in only 28% of cases. Accordingly, they did not call back in 72% of cases. And this is despite the fact that clients with real money in the auto industry are now literally worth their weight in gold: in July of this year, the Association of European Businesses already worsened its January forecast for car sales in Russia in 2016. According to the updated forecast, car sales will decrease by 10.3% by the end of the year.


Callback: 92% unknown
And finally, about what happened when our employees decided to call the car dealership back after some time. Apparently, they entered contacts and data about the potential client into the CRM only in 14% of cases. In the remaining 87% of cases, they had to introduce themselves and tell the background of the communication with the company again.

At the same time, only 3% of car dealerships were able to directly redirect a repeat call to a manager who had already spoken with the client. And only 5% passed it through a call center operator who knew exactly which employee of the car dealership he should transfer the call to.


Conclusions: What's good?
Russian car dealers, on average, handle initial inquiries from potential clients very well and bring them to the next stage of the sales funnel. Both technology and people are at their best here — calls are promptly answered by call centers, managers use and successfully implement effective scripts and sales techniques.


Conclusions: what's bad?
There are obvious problems with monitoring the points of contact between clients and the brand and tracking the entire chain of their interaction with the company. All this directly affects the organization of further communication with the client and the processing of their repeated requests. A possible solution is to more carefully use the possibilities of integrating CRM with virtual telephony and call tracking .