Where Most Service Clinics Fail – And How To Ensure Yours Succeeds, from Driving Sales.
Most dealers understand the importance of customer retention. They’re e-mail-blasting sales messages, sending direct mail, and their salespeople are combing over thousands of client records in their DMS, making phone calls to previous customers and orphan owners. The problem is that many dealers don’t realize that, all too often, those messages fall on deaf ears. Dealerships spend tons of money sending messages to customers that are mostly irrelevant because some vendor promised huge results in exchange for a check and the dealership’s database.
Most customer retention strategies are sales-focused. What about the hundreds of customers service departments see on a daily basis, or the customers who once had their vehicles regularly serviced but for some reason have stopped?
More sales and revenue exist in your service department than anywhere else in your dealership.
Service clinics are an excellent way to build relationships with your customers. Manufacturers are embracing service clinics because they know building solid relationships and educating customers on the value of dealership service increases brand retention. Dealers, however, tend to overlook service clinics because many don’t see value when attempting to implement and facilitate one on their own. Dealers send out mass invites, order catering and schedule staff for the event but, at the end of the day, if revenue generated from the event doesn’t exceed the costs, they declare it a failure and move on to the next idea.
