Auto dealers spend an inordinate amount of effort driving foot traffic to their dealerships. But when customers arrive at the dealer, sales reps become the primary point of contact. While initial interactions are often at the dealer and the lot, many of those relationships continue beyond the first visit.
Sales reps develop their own sales approaches using private messaging like WhatsApp and text messaging. The rep establishes this one-to-one relationship with the customer. They then try to navigate the fine line between professional sales behavior and personal service. But these crucial conversations between customers and reps are done in private communication channels and are not visible to dealer managers. This creates problems for dealerships including
- Poor rep sales processes
- Unprofessional rep behaviors
- Unprotected customer lists
Critical Customer Interactions are Not Visible or Controlled
The most valuable and sensitive part of a dealers business model is hidden: The buying process. All of the interactions between the customer and the sales rep are done in private communication with the rep.
- What are the conversations between the rep and customer?
- What are the customers’ interests?
- How well did the rep address their needs?
- Was the rep able to add value in the sale?
- Did they cover all the required points of discussion and disclosures?
- Are they being polite and professional?
This creates 3 critical problems for dealers.
- No Sales Management
A dealer’s most valuable asset is its customers. A dealer may have invested in brand building and professionalism. A dealer may earn foot traffic from interested and motivated customers. But what happens next?
Because much of the sales process is between the rep and the customer, it is important that sales managers have visibility into sales conversations. They need to be able to see the prospects’ intent, objections, and coach reps to overcome those. All these interactions are hidden in the sales rep’s private conversations, text messages and WhatsApp.
With no visibility into sales behaviors, it is impossible to see, let alone coach sales reps.
=> Dealers need to be able to see all rep communication with customers to improve sales rates.
- No Professional Standards Management
Sales rep tenure is notoriously short. And, to ensure that reps maintain the standards of the dealer, its imperative that management has visibility into rep behavior with customers- even from their personal devices. It is difficult to develop and maintain professional standards when dealers cannot see the vast number of interactions between customers and their reps that are in private text and WhatsApp messages.
And, this can lead to bad business practices with severe consequences.
Unfortunately, customers have experienced pushy- or even abusive – reps. While dealers are obviously abhorred by these events, they have no visibility into these behaviors and can’t prevent reps.
With no visibility into sales rep professionalism, they cannot maintain quality of service
=> Dealers need to monitor all rep communications with customers to ensure standard of service.
- No Customer Control
While customers are initially attracted to a dealership because of a dealer, or brand reputation, these relationships are quickly ‘owned’ by the sales rep that engages with them. This is a natural phenomenon as these are highly involved purchases and require a significant degree of trust and coaching.
However, too often, sales reps have conflicting incentives. They may continue serving the customer in a different way that offers them better terms and rewards. This ‘customer leakage’ hurts dealership profitability as reps may take advantage of their relationship with customers in non sanctioned ways.
By allowing unguarded customer-rep communication, dealers lose control and profits from their customer base.
=> Dealers must control their customer lists to maintain their business profitability
Dealers Business Success Requires Control of Reps’ Customer Communication
Dealers invest in attracting customers to their rooftops but then give their reps unchecked control over their customers. However, without visibility into rep-customer communication, dealers are blind to the painful realities of
- Poor rep sales processes
- Unprofessional rep behaviors
- Unprotected customer lists.
In order to improve dealer sales processes, uphold a standard of professionalism and ensure the integrity of dealer assets, dealers must be more active in overseeing rep communication.
Membit Gives Dealers Visibility and Control of Rep’s Customer Communication
Membit’s client communication platform gives dealers visibility into Membit’s Compliant Conversation Platform makes employee’s personal communication like text messages and WhatsApps visible and efficient.
Membit helps dealers automatically capture, integrate, block, alert all customer-conversations from rep’s personal texts, WhatsApps and chats, customer conversations. Dealers rely on Membit for 100% visibility, 100% compliance and saving admin work by 80%.