Actionable information

Scenario (based upon multiple real-life customer service call center reports) – You receive a report from your call center that shows more than 75 percent of all of the leads entered by a certain sales person are not legitimate.

What now? – The sales person that pulls leads from the phonebook will eventually be caught, but better now than later.

Lesson Learned – Telephone surveys of potential customers vs. actual customers provide vital information to a dealership.

Scenario – You receive a report from your call center that more than half of the people who visited your dealership last Saturday purchased or plan on purchasing somewhere else.

What Now? – Whatever is causing potential customers to buy elsewhere must be reversed immediately. Usually some combination of price, inventory availability and customer treatment is the culprit.

Lesson Learned – Sales people, in general, do a poor job of being objective when it comes to gathering customer information. Few sales people will ever know, much less admit, that a potential customer bought elsewhere.

Scenario – You receive a call center report that over the course of one month, only two customers identify an expensive billboard on a heavily traveled road as the reason they visited your dealership.

What Now? – Discovering that word-of-mouth and dealership events like rides and barbeques bring far more new customers to the dealership than an expensive billboard makes a complicated business decision easy.

Lesson Learned – Properly trained people can extract the kind of information that makes decision-making and management much more precise for the dealership owner or manager.

Scenario – You receive a call center report that five customers in the past month are furious at your dealership for being told a certain motorcycle was in inventory that actually was not.

What Now? – Finding out who is luring potential customers to the dealership through deception and promptly putting a stop to it will do wonders for a dealership’s reputation.

Lesson Learned – There is a wealth of information that can be learned from customers and potential customers after they leave a dealership. Find some method of gathering that information.