Jared Hamilton DSES Keynote Review: Competing on Customer Experience

What is the next chapter in automotive retailing? DrivingSales Founder and CEO, Jared Hamilton, posed this question during his keynote address at DSES 2014. In an industry where information is at consumers’ fingertips and it’s more challenging to differentiate your vehicles or dealership, what can dealers do to compete? Hamilton’s organization is a little over halfway through the industry’s largest research initiative aimed at discovering what consumers want from dealerships when shopping for a car. More importantly, what type of interactions lead them to purchase from a dealership – or leave without buying.

How did we do as an industry? Results were, you could say, less than stellar.

Consumers start the process with a lack of trust and dealers aren’t doing much to dissuade them. The traditional dealership walk-around, pricing practices and sales people that aren’t knowledgeable about the cars they’re selling make the experience worse.

Through interviews with car shoppers across the country, the research uncovered what they’re thinking about through real interactions with dealerships. In some cases, shoppers were still on the lot when interviewed.

One shopper said, “I find that a lot of the people who work at the dealership aren’t knowledgeable about what they’re selling and that’s a huge thing. I think that when you’re knowledgeable you come across confident and you build a trust factor with that customer.” Hamilton equated this to the Apple store. The employees at those stores know their product. He asked dealers if their training included deep product training and listening to the customers needs as opposed to selling them a car that day.

Another shopper explained, “Even the descriptions of some of the cars did not give prices for the cars, which really concerns me or bugged me. Especially when it said Internet only price but you had to call to get the Internet price.” Is her frustration justified? Why would she have to call for an internet-only price? Is your dealership website designed for lead generation or to help your customers move towards a purchase? On the subject of this interview Hamilton said, “Is your process designed to sell a car or is your process designed to prove a metric to your boss?” He added, “We (referring to dealers) are not the consumer. Our opinion doesn’t count.”

One consumer that was interviewed was not satisfied with the time-consuming dealership process.

“They want you to go through that process and sit at the desk when you’re done. Haggle over price and I just wanted to take a ten-minute test drive and get a price. They don’t want to do it that way.” Hamilton explained that by forcing shoppers into traditional dealership processes, they’re actually turning them off. Instead, dealers should adjust their sales process to the customers’ needs, time constraints and interests. He noted that dealers would stand to lose a “larger percentage of sales” by insisting on controlling the entire sales process.

Finally a customer said that he preferred Internet Sales people to traditional showroom retail staff. “Because they seem to be less of a sales-oriented position and more technology and dealing with information and quotes rather than…they’re not on the lot as much,” the shopper explained. He felt that their job was more right to the point and less of a traditional sales process. Hamilton spoke of the negative impact that old school car salesmen can have on a dealership and the industry. “What are we doing with our retail staff?” Hamilton asked. “At some point in time we’ve got to own it. We’ve got to train them or we’ve got to replace them.”

Hamilton then gave attendees a list of takeaways. He encouraged them to be willing to evolve in a changing industry. He said that the time for them to make change is now, essentially before it’s too late. He reported that new insights into the DrivingSales Customer Experience research will be shared at NADA this winter.