ATTRACTING CUSTOMERS ONLINE — AND THEN KEEPING THEM — IS A DUAL CHALLENGE. BUT EVOLVING TECHNOLOGIES AND METHODS, ALONG WITH A BIT OF GOOD OLD COMMON SENSE, CAN MAKE A REAL DIFFERENCE.
Sitting across from Alan Bird, president and CEO of SCI MarketView, our conversation about e-lead management and dealer websites turns to the concept of “disconnectivity” and the fact that many online strategies for dealers are either broken or don’t work as well as they should.
“We need an integrated approach so we can help them create a better experience for their customer.” If that were to happen then the situation would likely prove a win for all parties involved, from the OEMs, to the customers, vendors, dealers and even the third party sites.”
– Alan Bird, SCI MarketView
Bird has a very valid point. He’s spent a lot of time in the automotive, financing and digital sphere and has been recognized as a pioneer, so he’s familiar with what works and what doesn’t. During his time at AT&T Capital he helped spur the development of Internet financing tools for dealers, back when the Internet was barely out of diapers. “It was kind of frontier work that was done to automate some of the manual processes we had in place at the time,” he says. Today, almost two decades later things have advanced a lot — or have they?
Bird says that while SCI MarketView has grown to become one of the largest providers in the e-lead management space in the U.S., and has made significant inroads in his native Canada, there’s still plenty of work to be done. It’s part of the reason he says he signed up for the job. “The last two years have been a foundation for taking things to the next level,” he remarks.
LESS MATURE MARKET
Bird says that when it comes to e-lead management, dealers in Canada are often at a disadvantage, due to the fact that the market isn’t as mature as that in the U.S. He says that south of the border, around 50 per cent of all e-leads to dealerships come from third party sites such as Autobytel or Edmunds.com. In Canada, meanwhile, the figures are in the single digits.
Nevertheless, things are changing and Bird sees SCI MarketView as well-positioned to take advantage of the opportunities available as the market here in Canada grows, especially based on experience in the U.S. Working with General Motors, he says SCI has been able to really drive the enterprise lead management space for GM enabling the automaker to connect to all of its third party sites, corporate sites and dealers, as well as U.S. marketing solutions provider Cobalt.
In Canada however, Bird says that most e-leads currently come from used car content sites, so at present, there isn’t the same level of activity. “In order to really improve the process, e-lead providers will need to come together to deliver leads to dealers,” he says.
“We need an integrated approach so we can help dealers create a better experience for their customer.” If that were to happen, he says, then the situation would likely prove a win for all parties involved, from the OEMs, to the customers, vendors, dealers and even the third party sites that provide leads.
Bird says that dealers are experts, certainly when it comes to walk-in traffic. The trick is, getting those online leads into the showroom. Part of the problem is that dealers often don’t have an effective way of turning leads into real prospects, either because they can’t provide the right content, the platform they use for the delivery process isn’t optimized or the experience falls short.
(Left to right) Dave Page, Maria Espinoza, and Joe Gillespie, owner, Dealer E-Process. “Dealers want to be considered the authority on their brand,” he says “and if consumers can find all the information they need on the dealer’s site, that dealer becomes the authority.”
– Dave Page, Dealer E-Process
DELIVERING THE GOODS
That’s something Dave Page, owner at Dealer E-Process, also believes is a critical problem.
Page, whose company grew directly out of a dealership on the South Side of Chicago and has morphed into a leading website provider with a range of tools, says that when it comes to managing leads and attracting customers online, dealers struggle, simply because their websites don’t transition smoothly from one device to another, so what works on a desktop format doesn’t on a mobile. He says the situation is especially worrying as by 2015, Google predicts that 50 per cent of leads will come via mobile devices.
For dealers to be successful and embrace the future, they will need to develop a strategy for mobile specific websites. “Right now,” says Page, “you’ll find that a lot of website providers don’t have their own technology on the mobile side and have hired other companies to do it, resulting in a lack of integration.”
There is an issue with content matches, he says, “with different ads appearing on the desktop and mobile sites and features that work on one but not the other.” The result can be exceedingly frustrating for customers, who will simply choose to take their business elsewhere if they find the website too difficult or irritating to navigate.
Page notes that dealers can tackle the issue by taking advantage of online chat for mobile applications “people will chat because they are used to texting,” he says, as well as developing model specific websites. By doing so they are able to experience higher conversion rates and lower pay-per-click costs.
Maria Espinoza, national sales director at Dealer E-Process says that for Canadian dealers, providing a seamless mobile experience and enhanced interactivity can be hugely beneficial, especially considering that currently, Canada boasts higher per capita mobile usage than the U.S.
Espinoza points to a strategy in which Dealer E-Process worked with a large auto retailer in Canada to develop a successful formula built around model specific websites.
“We’ve seen success by dealers promoting these websites,” says Dave Page, “by creating campaigns for a particular model and then re-targeting those customers with that model to a model-specific site.” By using a model-specific angle, dealers are also able to build their own brand and attract more leads, because users don’t have to go back to the OEM site to get the information they need to make a purchase decision — it’s already in front of them.
“Dealers want to be considered the authority on their brand,” he says “and if consumers can find all the information they need on the dealer’s site, that dealer becomes the authority.”
“Video is becoming the most sought after way of communication because it’s real time and you can see exactly what’s happening.”
– Glen Demetrioff, DMT Development Systems Group
RAPID! FOLLOW UP
Besides campaigns, another way of helping ensure those leads (once they’re engaged) actually become customers, is thorough follow up. That is what led DMT Development Systems Group to develop RAPID! Response, which delivers leads from multiple channels directly to a salesperson’s mobile device, enabling them to respond to e-leads anytime, anywhere.
Glen Demetrioff, DMT’s CEO, says the firm has spent a great deal of time analyzing metrics, which showed that consumers want fast results and that in general, dealers simply weren’t delivering due to process challenges. “Thirty per cent of e-lead dealership responses are opened by the customer within 10 minutes and 60 per cent of responses are opened within the hour,” he says. “If I want to communicate with my daughter and text her, I expect a reply quickly, my expectations are high. So why does it take two to three hours for a dealership to respond and why are some leads even dropped? It’s not because a salesperson doesn’t want a sale but rather their current system impedes their ability to quickly retrieve the lead and respond to it any time of the day.”
With the advent of RAPID! Response, the traditional limitations of replying to leads after hours no longer apply, savvy dealers are able to empower their sales staff to live in a 24/7 world and respond to a question, anytime, anywhere. The result enables a raising of the bar in terms of exceeding expectations, so a customer can now get a response to features and availability on a Chevrolet Cruze, while watching TV on a Sunday afternoon.
Demetrioff says that based on the numbers he’s seen, those dealers that cater outside traditional showroom hours are able to respond with a 24 hour service are the ones that are proving more successful. When the dealership showroom is closed, RAPID! Response manages customer expectations by sending a courtesy reply informing the lead that someone will respond the next business day while at the same time alerting staff to the request in real time, 24 hours a day.
Besides enabling staff to engage with consumers on a 24/7 basis, RAPID! Response is also able to integrate with various CRM tools, via DMT’s Live Lead so it can push information received from a customer into the CRM while maintaining tracking.
Additionally, because RAPID! Response provides a copy of the correspondence given to each customer for every lead, it essentially eliminates the need for mystery shops, since the data is provided in a dashboard that can be reviewed in real time. As a result, dealers are able to identify patterns and trends when it comes to e-leads so they in turn are able to form more effective strategies and grow their business.
