Your customers’ experience is immediately impacted by your callers’ journey, and making that journey a great one is the biggest area of opportunity that a dealer has. Your bottom line is directly impacted by your phone processes and your phone skills. Learning how to overcome the nationwide statistic that 37% of customers asking for sales aren’t reaching an agent, and of the 63% that do connect, 52% can’t be entered into your CRM because there wasn’t enough contact information collected is easier than some may think.
Consider that many dealers are allowing processes, like the round-robin, to exist to manage incoming and outgoing phone calls. Too often we are allowing the unskilled, untrained, and even untrainable team members to control our destiny. Too often we blame our agency, our CRM, our digital partner, on failures or under-performances that impact our expenses and our profitability.
Many times, we give up and hire an outsourced team to take and make calls for us at no small expense, but this effort does little to protect your business against poor internal processes, and frankly, you deserve to get high-quality phone performance from the team in your store that you already pay to manage your customer experience. Measure the impact of your phone on your financial statement.
Taking the big data that we have all learned to love and making it into small enough bites to tackle every day will bring an immediate impact to your bottom line and market share. If you are utilizing a service that tracks and reports website traffic, like Google Analytics, you are on the right path. Now let’s take that path and move to the next step. You know that your phone is ringing, but, you don’t know what is happening on the phones. Let’s find out.
Why is DNI relevant to my bottom line?
The science of the phone. It turns out it is rocket science. Dynamic Number Insertion (DNI) is finally a way to measure and give proper attribution for search results and third-party advertising results. DNI is the wave of the future and we want to make sure you know how to use it and feed Google Analytics with DNI data.
As we’re sure many of you already know, DNI, or dynamic number insertion, uses toll free numbers that initially flash as a dealer’s local number but then immediately display separate individual numbers that get stored in the cache of the customer. With DNI, a dealer’s local number is displayed just long enough for Google to register that it is being used, but then switches to a trackable toll-free number that is now assigned to that user. This is how DNI offers the benefits of both local and toll-free numbers.
Dynamic number insertion is not new, but it is relevant. DNI has been around almost as long as tracking numbers. However, lately DNI has gained traction because Google’s latest update has stopped playing nicely with toll free numbers. Google updated their algorithm so that in order to stay NAP (name, address, phone number profile) compliant, your local line should be posted universally across the web. DNI offers dealers the opportunity to post their local number to please Google, but also allows them to track offline conversions from different ad sources which in turn benefits their bottom line.
Now that DNI has been thrusted back into the spotlight, there are important factors to consider when investing the time and money into a dynamic number solution because not all DNIs are created equally.
Is it designed for mobile?
In the past few months, Google has announced two new updates. The first is that mobile search will now be driven by a separate algorithm than your desktop, page load speed being a major component of this algorithm. This means your DNI widget must not hinder your mobile page load speed.
Secondly, Google has added text extensions to its mobile ads with promising results. Take advantage of texting by ensuring that you are using text enabled tracking lines. Whether they are local numbers or toll free make sure the numbers you choose are text enabled.
Customer-initiated text
In this day in age, we all assume that everyone with a phone sends text messages. According to Trumpia.com, 90% of adults own a mobile phone and 98% of smartphone users open their text message within 3 minutes of receiving the message, meaning we are virtually always available via text, which might not be the case for phone calls. With the norm of communicating becoming a text, what makes the way a dealership should communicate any different?
Meet your customers where they want to be met. Many customers would prefer to text with you then to talk with you on the phone. 15-20% of customers respond to calls by texting back; with the leading response being “Who is this?” Begin to set up an interactive text conversation to be able to connect with you callers when they text you. You can double your contact rate from 2/10 to 4/10 if you agree to text with the customers who text you.
During my session at the Digital Dealer 23 Conference & Expo (Sept. 18-20th in Las Vegas), I will reveal more about how your phone process is affecting your customer experience, advertising ROI, and your bottom line. You will learn what’s necessary to fix your phones and the best practices you can start using today!
Register now for Digital Dealer 23 Conference & Expo and start building your agenda by choosing from more than 100+ sessions.
