DMS data, to drive marketing campaigns and sell service, is especially effective right now. And those campaigns are even more powerful when you can use the exact communication channel that your customers prefer.

source: Automotive News | April 19, 2010 | Lindsay Chappell | located here

Anyone who was a friend of Florida resident Thomas Alascio might have gotten the following Twitter tweet from him last October:

“Took the kids to Sonic for dinner. Great food and service. Route 60 Hyundai should take lessons.”

Tolstoy, it isn’t. But as millions of Americans link together on chatty outlets such as Twitter, Facebook, blogs and Internet message boards and product review forums, auto dealers are grasping that social media offer an explosive new opportunity to market themselves and their vehicles.

They are also an explosive new source of negative publicity and customer kvetching.

Just as customers easily can tell the world about the wonderful dealership experience they just had, they also can blanket the nation’s laptops and Blackberries with angry denouncements and warnings to stay away.

Dealerships are scrambling to protect their reputations online, and ad agencies and online marketing shops are offering to help.

Speeding word-of-mouth

The Alascio case illustrates how social media can propel bad word-of-mouth far faster than ever before.

Alascio had received a loaner car from Route 60 Hyundai in Vero Beach, Fla. The dealership said he had damaged it. The two parties disagreed over Alascio’s financial obligations.

So last October, after an altercation at the dealership, Alascio took his beef to the airwaves, tweeting critical remarks about the store once or twice a day.

A typical post: “Beautiful nite. Pretty moon and btw. Route 60 Hyundai sucks.”

The dealership wasn’t amused. In December, Route 60 had its attorney write Alascio a letter demanding that he “cease and desist” making what the attorney called defamatory comments. The letter warned Alascio that his Twitter comments “entitle Route 60 Hyundai to bring an action against you for defamation and tortuous interference with an advantageous business relationship.”

The letter closed with a stern warning to the customer in all capital letters and underlined: “PLEASE GOVERN YOURSELF ACCORDINGLY.”

That warning sparked a longer letter from Alascio’s own attorney. It challenged Route 60′s legal claim and urged it to drop the matter or face a lawsuit from Alascio.

In a more conciliatory conclusion, Alascio’s attorney proposed that Route 60 instead consider actually inviting the unhappy customer into the store to discuss ways to improve its customer service.

That never happened, and the case simply disappeared, says Alascio’s attorney, Marc Randazza of Miami.

Stark advice

Randazza offers some stark advice for dealers upset at comments posted by disgruntled customers.

“If you are confronted with a consumer complaint and you pick up the phone to ask your lawyer to try and intimidate the consumer into silence, you should fire yourself for being an abject imbecile,” he says.

“Even if the consumer is wrong, it might cost you a few hundred bucks to make the consumer happy, which then would turn into positive word-of-mouth advertising.

“On the other hand, if you do something moronic like have your lawyer write a threatening letter or, worse yet, actually file suit, then you will get a firsthand lesson in how wrong the person was who said, ‘There is no such thing as bad publicity.’ “

Other dealers involved in the untamed new world of social media agree that conciliation probably should be the first response to online complaints.

“There are always going to be people out there who are unhappy about something,” says Michelle David, Internet manager at Esserman Volkswagen and Nissan in Miami. “You’ve got to accept that and consider ways to turn a negative into a positive.

“In social media, it’s inevitable that some people are going to criticize you and make negative reviews. Hopefully, if you focus on doing a good job and treating your customers well, you’re going to generate a lot more positive reviews from customers than negative ones. People will read the good ones and realize that the complaint isn’t the norm.

“But you can’t just let it lie.”

Tracking comments

David is doing what many Internet-focused retailers and store managers are starting to do: She has free Google alerts set up to search the Internet for Esserman’s name. Anytime someone mentions Esserman, she gets an e-mail — usually about a dozen a day. She then can follow up and troubleshoot, if necessary.

Free Internet search engines, such as Technorati and IceRocket, trawl hundreds of millions of private blogs and Twitter communiques looking for references to a brand name or dealership name. But the real question is one of management philosophy: What should a dealership do once it finds a knock to its reputation ?

For Hagen Durant, the social-media-savvy general manager of Classic Chevrolet in suburban Tulsa, Okla., the discovery means responding immediately — doing a quick self-examination to determine whether the customer is right to be peeved, then reaching out to that person.

“Problems come up fast, and they can spread even faster on the Internet,” Durant says. “If you can just reach out and let the customer know the issue is important to you, you can often save the situation.”

Durant recently got an e-mail heads-up that a consumer was bad-mouthing Classic Chevrolet on his Facebook page. The critic had negotiated for a used van from the store, but by the time he drove 50 miles to buy it, the van had just been sold.

The critic’s Internet report: “These guys suck.”

Durant sent the customer a note of his own, offering to buy him a tank of gas to compensate him for his trouble of driving across town. The conciliation wooed the customer out of his anger and opened a dialogue with the dealership.

The next day, by chance, the deal on the van fell through. Durant alerted the Facebooking customer that it was available again. Durant promised to fill the van with gasoline if the customer would come back and buy it. He did.

At Suzuki of Wichita, General Manager Tom White Jr. discovered a customer writing Facebook complaints about bad service from the Kansas store. After looking into the matter, White concluded that the customer was right to be upset. A repair order had been mishandled, a part had gone unordered and a repair job had taken days longer than it should have.

‘Call me’

Store owner Scott Pitman posted a note on the customer’s Facebook page saying, “Please call me, I’m going to make this right.”

The dealership ended up buying dinner for the disgruntled customer — who has since returned to the store for more business.

“We look at this as an opportunity to turn people into repeat customers,” White says of monitoring the Internet for problems. “Obviously, you can’t give away your product, but you can go out of your way to do the right thing with people.

“Customers are talking to each other about you today. You have to be out there as part of that conversation.”

The Wichita store is active on youtube.com, posting short videos of the dealership to stay in the eye of local Internet surfers. Store employees use inexpensive Flip video cameras to shoot images of new products and satisfied customers taking deliveries. The store employs a high school student part time to upload the shorts, in hopes of generating positive comments from viewers.

Viewer comments are a key part of the new social media order. Web sites such as dealerrater.com and yelp.com — the latter welcomes feedback from auto dealership customers to compile ratings — are being used by a startling number of consumers, says Dave Howlett, senior director of consumer insight and strategy at J.D. Power and Associates.

Howlett says that if dealers are not closely monitoring those online reviews of their stores, they are being negligent. He recommends encouraging satisfied customers to weigh in on the sites whenever possible.

If only one customer posts a review of a dealership, and it happens to be negative, the rating site will show readers that 100 percent of the dealership’s reviews are negative. Adding just two positive reviews will reverse the impression.

“We ask our customers to visit those sites and post their positive reviews,” says Esserman’s Michelle David. “Maybe you can’t do anything about the one negative review. But if you can offset it with a couple of positive ones, you can undo the damage.”

Read our reviews from drivingsales.com

Pleasanton, CA– February 22, 2010 – CIMA Systems, the leading provider of multi-channel marketing communications technologies to the automobile industry, has won the “Top Rated” Database/Owner Marketing award in the 2009 DrivingSales Vendor Ratings Awards.

CIMA Systems was chosen as the “Top Rated” vendor among 22 other Database/Ownership Marketing category vendors.

“We are extremely honored to have earned the Top Rated award in the Database/Ownership Marketing Vendor category,” said Gary Nixon, President & CEO, CIMA Systems. “We continually hear from our clients the tremendous increase in business CIMA Systems is driving into their store and how much they appreciate our pro-active dedicated support staff. The 5 star rating they gave us is truly a tribute to our entire team”.

CIMA Systems works like a virtual Business Development Center using multi-platform marketing and communications to enhance customer loyalty and drive vehicle, service and parts sales. It can replace from one to four vendors and drive down expenses while providing dealership management with insightful demographic insight, and sales and marketing data to fine-tune their sales and marketing efforts.

The 2009 DrivingSales Vendor Ratings Awards, presented at the 2010 NADA Convention and Expo, measure satisfaction with vendors by allowing dealers to rate and review their vendors online at DrivingSales.com. Only vendors who achieved top rankings in dealer satisfaction in each category, as determined by the thousands of dealers who are part of the DrivingSales.com community, received awards.

“We are proud to present this award to CIMA Systems which has achieved a standard of excellence that is clearly resonating with dealers,” said DrivingSales CEO and Founder Jared Hamilton. “This year’s award winners have won recognition in one of the most challenging years on record for our industry.  We salute them for their ongoing commitment to provide value to their dealer clients.”

Interactive Automated Marketing and Customer Service Solution Ensures More Service Business for Auto Dealers

LEVITTOWN, New York – (February X, 2010) – Parayil & Mann Dealer Services Inc. (PMDS), today announced it has added the powerful CIMA Systems suite of service customer communications and profit-building tools to its DealerUps Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system.

Called ServiceUps, this module complements DealerUps front-end CRM, and adds dynamic, multi-platform customer communications and marketing tools to drive business in fixed operations departments.  ServiceUps communicates to customers in their preferred method – email, phone, text, Live Chat, etc. – and automatically so no opportunity to bring customers back into the service lane is missed.

ServiceUps powered by CIMA Systems, offers:

• AutoRemind: Unlimited marketing campaigns, including new service appointment reminders, vehicle ready notifications, special order parts arrival notifications, service thank you letters, service CSI surveys and service-due notifications, among others.
• AutoAppoint: Automated service scheduling that allows customers to schedule confirmed service appointments 24/7, 365 days a year via web or automated phone.
• S.M.A.R.T Service Menus: Interactive online service menus marketed proactively to customers based on each customer’s vehicle parameters. Dealers can capture more service business when customers know beforehand what services are required for their vehicle with respective prices.
• eCapture: An email appending tool which captures valid email addresses for those customers without one within the dealerships DMS.
• CIMAVision ROI Analytical & Reporting Tool: Reports regarding customers, communication ROI’s, employee productivity, customer satisfaction and revenues.

“One of our primary goals for 2010 was to add an effective set of tools to DealerUps for the service department to create a true full-fledged service and sales CRM. ServiceUps powered by CIMA Systems more than fulfills that goal,” commented Guy Manasse, DealerUps President.

“It was critical for us to offer a system that is both affordable and helps dealers find lost opportunities within their own service department database. The icing on the cake is that the CIMA System enables dealers to communicate all these marketing ideas with very little added cost, using email, the web, text, Live Chat, IVR and more in a single tool that is simple to use,” Manasse added.

CIMA Systems President & CEO Gary Nixon agreed. “ServiceUps added to the DealerUps CRM gives dealers the flexibility, speed and robust technology to communicate in all the emerging formats, interactively, to drive service business and retain more customers.”

PMDS’ DealerUps (www.dealerups.com) is a state-of-the-art CRM system that enables automotive dealers to effectively manage current and prospective customers from one database. Tracked and reported in real time is information such as Internet leads, sales, service, walk-ins, and incoming telephone calls.  Dealers can also receive and respond to any in-coming email leads using web-enabled cell phones, PDAs or iPhones, with all incoming and outgoing data captured and pushed directly into DealerUps and the customer’s record.

About CIMA Systems

CIMA Systems provides interactive automated marketing and customer service solutions to the automotive market. Its comprehensive software solutions enable dealers and automotive service businesses to communicate with prospects and clients throughout the client lifecycle. CIMA System’s automated, real-time, communications-management solutions provide immediate 24/7 customer feedback to front- and back-end marketing campaigns, resulting in higher sales, increased client interaction and lower overhead. For more information, visit www.cimasystems.net.

About Parayil & Mann Dealer Services, Inc.

Parayil & Mann Dealer Services, Inc. (PMDS) is a privately held automotive consulting and technology company specializing in the optimization of dealership processes and customer relationship management (CRM). PMDS is lead by industry experts with more than four decades of extensive automotive retail experience. The company has headquarters in Long Island, New York and regional offices in Dallas, Texas.  For more information visit www.dealerups.com.

If we peaked your interest, CIMA would like to introduce you to DEALERPRO Training Solutions www.dealerprotraining.com, a CIMA Preferred Vendor and a Preferred Partner of the newly created NADA University. NADA will be announcing this exciting new training format at the NADA Convention in Orlando.

DEALERPRO has helped over 700 auto dealers over the past 10 years to dramatically improve their fixed operations gross profit with side-by-side, hands-on training and coaching of service and parts personnel. DEALERPRO shows your people what to do and how to do it by working with them and actual customers in your service drive. This is not classroom training or short-term consulting. DEALERPRO spends the first two weeks installing processes, procedures, software, sales boards for techs and advisors, menus and beginning the training process with your people. After that, a DEALERPRO trainer returns one-week each month for the next 13 months to make sure that the processes and procedures they installed are being followed. DEALERPRO trainers average 20 years of retail dealership experience and must have been at least a service manager to qualify for the position.

The good news? DEALERPRO training is performance-based, so if they don’t generate a revenue increase for your dealership, they don’t get paid!

DEALERPRO has generously offered all CIMA dealers a NO COST Profit Potential Evaluation of your service and parts departments, a $995 value! They will come to your dealership, collect and analyze your fixed operations data and show you where you are today. Even more important, they will show you where you could be with a first level business plan based on your specific dealership’s opportunities.

This is a limited time offer! Call CIMA Systems CEO, Gary Nixon at (925) 461-4601 or DEALERPRO CEO, Don Reed at (888) 553-0100 now for your FREE evaluation. Just mention the CIMA Systems/DealerPro offer.

This past week, Reynolds sent out a letter advising you that effective January 4, 2010 you and your vendors will not be able to access your DMS data via modem. As noted above, we do not pull data from your DMS via modem and therefore CIMA Systems has and will continue to send out your daily marketing communications campaigns without interruption. If you have any questions please contact our support team. We look forward to continuing to assist you in driving increased revenue to your dealership.

The physical move will be on Friday, November 20 2009. During the switch-over, our phones will be down and the best method of communicating with us that day will be email.

The move will not impact the ongoing operations and daily customer communications, but we apologize in advance for any inconvenience this may cause you. We would like to thank you for your patience during this time.

We look forward to serving you.

Sincerely,
CIMA Systems

Proactive marketing of factory-recommended services as well as dealership recommendations prior to the customer arriving in the drive not only pre-sells your service business, but displays your expertise at keeping their vehicle in top performance.

To accomplish this, you will need a plan of action and some automation to make such pre-selling practical, largely hands-off, and effective. Your audience must include new and used vehicle customers, current service customers, those you haven’t serviced in a while, and those which declined some of your recommended services.

Today, most dealers attempt to do this with a “blast” direct mail or email offering one-time service specials like a lube, oil filter or brake special hoping customers will see a coupon that is applicable to the service they feel their vehicles need. Although this plan does result in a spike in service, it is only temporary.’

A more assertive, retention-building approach practices by many of today’s successful dealers is to proactively inform customers of their vehicle’s service needs, based on service intervals, previously declined services, and other factors, before they arrive on the service lane. This strategy builds their service business using a planned, continuous program destined to pre-sell customers on using their dealerships for these services.

Technology available today makes this straight-forward by automatically creating messages and offers specific to the customer’s vehicle make, model, mileage, and individual needs. Each communication is then delivered to the customer in their desired format (e.g. phone, text, email, etc.) with an appropriate link to details about the recommended services.

Here are the basics for getting started:

• Put into place an automated service reminder program that sends service-due notifications based on the vehicle’s service history within the dealer management system (DMS) and factory/dealer recommendations.
•  Link each communication (i.e. email) to a recommended service menu, based on vehicle make, model and mileage.
•  Include a link into an automated service appointment system. Some systems will automatically log the customer into your appointment system with preloaded customer and vehicle information. The customer then simply needs to confirm the date and time. The idea is to make it easy for your customer to do business with you.
•  Communicate other recommendations periodically, based on vehicle history within your DMS, such as previously declined services, recall notifications, seasonal services, etc.
• Review recommended services at write up if the customer did not respond to your proactive recommendations. Consider placing a video terminal in the customer lounge so customers can again review the recommended services and “why” explanations.

source: Dealer Marketing Magazine

Boosting fixed ops profits

The first question we put to our experts was the obvious one: How can dealers boost the profits from their fixed operations departments?

One obvious option that many dealers have used is to send direct mail of email offers to customers who have bought cars from them in the past. Gary Nixon, president and CEO of CIMA Systems, warns, however, that “Many dealerships attempt to do this with “blast” direct mail or emails offering a single service special, such as a LOF [Lube, Oil, and Filter] discount. These blasts then leave the dealership wondering, “What do we offer next?”

Nixon advices that you use “focused ‘drip’ marketing,” instead of blast emails. With a “drip” marketing focus instead of a “blast” marketing focus, dealers should be “continuously communicating specials and promotions specific to the customer and to his or her vehicle, model and mileage…in a way the customer prefers, whether phone, email (with video), text, blog or hosted live chat,” adds Nixon.

Sending out a continuous “drip” of relevant email offers is more effective than traditional blast emails or bulk mailer for two reasons. First, when you target your offers to your customers’ needs, your odds of winning their business goes way up, because you aren’t sending out emails that people will just delete, or worse, cause them to block all of your emails. The second benefit is that you don’t have to continuously come up with better and better offers, because every month you’ll have a new group of customers for whom the offer will be new. This will free you up and increase your returns, because you won’t have to use ever increasing discounts to get the same level of business.

Another option for increasing your service business is to sell more to your customers when they are in the service lane. David Boyle, president and COO of Mobile Productivity, Inc. (MPi), believes “there really is only one way [to grow your service business] in today’s business climate and that is through a robust vehicle inspection process…Our data shows that when performing a vehicle inspection more needed work is not sold than what gets done. This leaves a huge revenue opportunity for every dealer if they just recognize the importance of this process and capitalized on these legitimately needed repairs.”

The key here is “legitimately needed repairs.” Thanks to the Internet, today’s customers are well informed and they don’t want the runaround. They also are keeping their vehicles longer, however, and if you can show them how the repairs will extend the life of their vehicle, you have almost made the sale already. “Part of a dealers brand promise should be an environment where the dealership is the customers, ‘friend in the car business.’ What does it mean when someone says they have a ‘friend in the car business?’ It means that they have someone they trust implicitly to take care of them. If every customer felt that way, retention would never be an issue,” continues Mr. Boyle.

These two approaches are not mutually exclusive, one is meant to bring more customers in and the other is meant to increase sales once they’re at the store. Both can boost your bottom line, but you will get the best results through a combination of both techniques. The wonderful thing about both these techniques is that neither is prohibitively expensive. The main requirements are time and effort.

Using fixed ops to boost vehicle sales

Besides the profits that the service lane can bring directly to you dealership, it can also grow your revenue by boosting your vehicle sales. Those customers in your service lane represent an opportunity to “get in front of the ball” and be there when the customer is ready to buy. If you treat your customers well and build a relationship based on trust, they won’t feel the need to look anywhere else; they’ll come to you when it’s time to purchase a new vehicle.

David Boyle, of Mobile Productivity Inc. (MPi), says, “Dealers can use service to boost their vehicle sales by having processes in service that promote a ‘customers for life’ philosophy. If a customer’s bond to the service department is very strong they will go nowhere else to buy but that dealership when a customer is ready for their next vehicle purchase.”

Of course, if you want to sell new vehicles to your service customers, it is essential to know when they’re in the market for a new car. You shouldn’t try and sell them a vehicle every time they come through your service lane. If you do, your message will just blend in to all the “white noise” of advertising that consumers see every day and erode the trust that you have built up with that customer. You need to engage customers at the moment they begin to think about purchasing a new vehicle. One of the easiest ways to do this is to track the mileage on the vehicles you service. “Tracking vehicle customers’ mileage…helps dealers identify when customers’ vehicles may have aged sufficiently so they’ll be back in the market soon,” explains Gary Nixon of CIMA Systems.

Winning customers back from the independents

There are other dealerships that service vehicles, but your real competition is the independent service stations. They are the ones stealing your customers with offers of cheap service. It doesn’t matter if your service is superior and a better deal in the long run that is not the perception of many consumers.

“The aftermarket does a masterful job of telling consumers why they should choose them over the dealer; the dealers need to do the same. We should never be ashamed of what we charge and in fact should remember the adage, ‘We are not concerned with what other shops charge for they know best what their services are worth’,” advises David Boyle. To do this “will require our service advisors to actually spend time informing and talking to their customers from the very first visit while the vehicle is still under warranty and educate them all the way up to the time they have the decision of staying with the dealer or going elsewhere,” he adds. “This is something we are not very good at in this industry.”

In order to communicate the value of dealer service to consumers it is vital to “talk” to them in the way they prefer. This means both the method they prefer (i.e. phone, email etc.) and the manner in which you converse with them. “Every service customer is different and, to get their attention and earn their business, they must be interacted with so [that your] communication matches their preference. ‘A-type’ personalities want direct, succinct answers without out a lot of detail—simply what’s in it for me? Others like long explanations and details,” imparts Gary Nixon. “Service advisors good at reading people and able to be flexible in their communications styles to match the particular customer’s do a better job at connecting with customers and earning their trust.” And we all know, when you earn a customer’s trust, you earn their business.

source: Dealer Marketing Magazine, by Michael Bowen   

Wednesday, 02 September 2009