What if you had access to real-time analytics regarding the top reasons women buy at your dealership? Or, more pointedly, why women leave your dealership after they visit and don’t return? How about the top websites they visit before shopping at your store? Or, their expectation with your service advisor, and why they don’t come back after the last interaction?
Nothing is better than hard numbers directly from your very own customers to show an unbiased view about your dealership’s performance. Specifically, reviewing data from your women customers ensures that you are listening to a market segment that makes up 53% of your millennial car buyers and 50% across all age groups.
From financial services to professional sports to mobile phone carriers to retailing, data mining, or the practice of sifting through and categorizing data, is used every day. There are staggering numbers of daily and weekly reports measuring accountability and success rates at dealerships. But what about those tracking women’s ups, shoppers, buyers and service drive clients?
This article provides ways to acquire and assess opportunistic data for dealers who are leaning in and want a better pulse on their ever-growing segment of customers. Further, it explains how you can use the data to adjust your current advertising and selling programs to optimize your dealership’s performance. In this highly competitive industry, there is now an opportunity to receive customized real-time feedback, without hiring expensive agencies to conduct market research.
Advanced Analytics the Easy Way
Collecting the difference-making data does not have to be onerous, nor do you have to hire a costly market research company. Companies like Women-Drivers.com provide CERTIFIED dealers with a WSI® (Women Satisfaction Index®) INSIGHT Data report that shows satisfaction scores from female reviews. After each dealer review, women can opt-in to answer a 25-question survey about their dealership experience. An amazing 92% of women who write reviews also fill out the survey that is broken into the key categories of shopping, buying and the service drive. The real-time, in-depth information is then compiled into the WSI INSIGHT Dealer Report.
Digital-Ethnography: Unlike Other Reputation Services
Digital-ethnography is a way for customers to report their own experiences without the direct involvement of a researcher. With the proliferation of the Internet and smartphones, customers can easily record their thoughts and feelings. This method goes way beyond a traditional “5-star” rating system, including:
- Information specifically about women, from women. Nine times out of 10, women are willing to share in-depth insights into their entire experience, providing much more independent information and value to dealer principals and executives.
- Predictive Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that go beyond Google, Yelp or leading rating systems.
Predictive, Trending Analytics for Turn-Key Solutions
Unlike the CSI surveys, it is important to understand the power of third-party, unbiased results that provide an intimate, accurate view of your customer’s true experience and preferences. The report gives dealer executives the chance to see areas that will benefit from improvement. The areas that need improvement may be fixed with simple changes in your sales strategies or service processes and may deliver a lot of value to your store’s bottom line.
This is an exciting model where dealers receive groundbreaking independent data and predictive analytics about their future women’s experiences, which allows new programs to be developed to continually improve customer experience.
“Reviewing data drom your women customers ensures that you are listening to a market segment.”
Missing Link: How This Benefits Your Dealership
When you have insightful data, it helps dealers to throw out the “textbook traditions,” and truly provides the missing link for leaders, providing the proof they need to make it safe for them to implement shifts in their advertising and marketing. Other benefits include:
- Creation of a true evidence-based reputation. Your women prospects or customers have given an honest review of your performance using a safe, third-party in the privacy of their homes or on their smart phones.
- Creation of trust before your woman prospect even walks in the door. Women rely on reviews more than men and will trust the reviews written by women. This means that women will travel farther to visit your store and will have already established a level of trust that is conducive to a sale.
- Availability of detailed data that allows you to better navigate the consumer journey.Learn why women buy from you and what makes them leave without buying. Understand a woman’s emotions when she is shopping for a car and learn what really matters during the sales process.
Asking the Right Questions – Get the Real Answers
The first step in collecting customer data is to ensure you are asking the right questions. There are three categories of data that get collected: shopping, purchasing and the service drive. Within these categories are specific questions that help you understand how your store is performing with female prospects and customers.
Shopping: This category is key to helping you attract more women prospects and to learn how to turn more prospects into buyers… after all, the “shopper” did not buy. Questions include how your prospect felt about the sales advisor, if she felt understood, respected and their ability to answer questions knowledgeably. Additionally, knowing whether the woman has looked at other dealerships, how far she traveled from home and whether she brought a shopping companion are answered. If the prospect decides not to buy, then it is key to understand why. Conversely, if the woman does buy, knowing the reasons she chose your dealership will be valuable for future marketing purposes.
Buying: When a woman purchases or leases a car from your dealership, it is important to understand her satisfaction with all aspects of the purchase, from the sales advisor to the financing and finalization of the deal. For women, satisfaction goes beyond price, model or color selection. Women want a total deal, including a connection with the sales advisor and the dealership. You will understand what websites were visited, what features appeal best to women, and the top reason women buy from your sales team and your dealership. The questions answered go beyond, “Did you like your sales person?” and involve deeper emotions.
Servicing: The Service Center is the place where you create the relationship for a woman to buy her next car in five to eight years. Once you have a woman’s business, you must work to keep it by ensuring she has a high level of satisfaction every time. S, you will need answers to questions like: Was the service wait time appropriate? Did she receive a written estimate? Was she comfortable in the waiting lounge? What other services would help ensure she comes back to your service lane? If she had a negative experience, what was the dissatisfaction that will cause her to choose another service center in the future?
In any sales or service experience, customer satisfaction is at the top of the list. Collecting and analyzing data is part of a digital strategy that provides an in-depth look at what happens across all sales throughout your dealership. Using data analysis to make enhancements to your sales and service strategies is not only guaranteed to create more satisfied customers, it will also add more dollars to your dealership’s bottom line. And those improved numbers will speak volumes about your dealership’s success.