7 minute read
Turn your data into proft
from Modern Tire Dealer - August 2015
by EndeavorBusinessMedia-VehicleRepairGroup
There are tools to help extract consumer data from your sales and service tickets. Leaving that data behind is like falling asleep on the job, then waking up like Rip Van Winkle to discover your customers have left you behind.
Storing customer information doesn’t make your business money. Using it does
By Joy Kopcha
Dave Vogel says most tire dealers are siting on a pile of money. And ignoring it. Teir computers might as well be stufed with cash, and their fling cabinets overfowing like a triple-cherry slot machine jackpot.
All because of this common scenario: A consumer comes into a shop; a technician does an inspection and fnds repairs that need to be done; but for whatever reason — the common refrains are the consumer doesn’t have the time or the money — the work isn’t done right away.
Before the digital revolution, those paper tickets might have landed in a fling cabinet. Today, digital tickets are housed in computers or in the cloud. Te important lesson is to not let those recommendations get dusty and buried in cobwebs.
So Vogel says dealers need to remind consumers of the maintenance work that needs to be done.
“Tey needed that work to be done. It could cause them more problems. It’s beter for end-user customers. It’s beter for shops,” says Vogel. “It’s probably one of the more overlooked things in a shop. Anytime you talk to someone in a shop about this their eyes light up.”
Te trick is, retrieving those past recommendations has to be quick and easy. “Sure, they could run to the fling cabinet, but that would be cumbersome.”
Point-of-sale systems ofer users the ability to mine the ticket data, and searching for declined services is a good way to uncover some of that untapped potential. ASA Automotive Systems sells TireMaster, a program that features pop-up alerts for declined services when a consumer returns to the
counter. Vogel says TireMaster groups vehicles by household, meaning even when a mom brings in the sports utility vehicle for new tires, she’ll be reminded of the brake job previously recommended on her son’s pickup.
Vogel says his company knows those declined-service alerts are “a diferentiator for us. It’s been a big contributor to our success.”
But even if a dealer still is running a pen-and-paper operation, technicians are looking for and recommending other services to consumers. It might take more efort to keep track of those
recommendations without a computer database, but Vogel says it’s still possible.
“Look at all the money and effort it takes to get a new customer, and this is your own clientele that already likes you, and you’re not maximizing your efort with them,” Vogel says.
Use your system to the max
One detail stands in the way of dealers recouping those lost sales, says Jay Adams, president of MaddenCo Inc.
“Make sure that they capture good data. When a customer comes in don’t create a cash invoice, or just say ‘Jay’ or ‘Joy’ at the top,” Adams says. “Capture the address, phone number, email. Even though that takes a litle more time and keystrokes at the counter, in order to data mine properly you’ve got to have good data.” Te customer information, paired with other tools such as a license plate look up service, can help a dealer “atach good customer information to good vehicle information.” And while there are apps and tools to use to search for phone numbers and addresses, Adams stresses that telephone lookups in particular are geting trickier as more consumers rely solely on cell phones. With all of that information in a dealer’s database, there are endless ways to reach out to consumers, but Adams admits he likes “emailing and texting because they’re free. “You can send a thank you note, a service reminder based on date or mileage — but that’s depending on your guys capturing mileage,” he says. “It’s about using your system to the best of your ability.” Adams says the “vast majority” of MaddenCo customers who use its Tire Dealer System are hiring a third party company to send customer postcards and leters, even though dealers can do it themselves. Graham Tire Co. is one of those dealers who uses MaddenCo’s system and turns its data over to a third party to reach out to customers. Lyle Christensen, vice president of information systems for Graham Tire, says the stores in South Dakota and Nebraska rely on KeyMotive LLC and Jerry Terrasi, its sales and marketing director, to do more than send emails and postcards. Tere’s one Graham Tire location that hosts an annual customer appreciation pancake breakfast. Invitations are sent, but they’re not directed to every customer in the database, Christensen says.
“He can mill the data, get the higher spending customers, or customers that have the certain number of visits, which shows loyalty,” Christensen says. “(Te pancake breakfast) is a selling event for us. We have lots of product available to sell and special deals and special opportunities to save money on tires and service.”
By fne-tuning the invitation list, the store connects with, and ultimately rewards, its most valuable customers.
Graham Tire reviews its data on a daily basis. With 28 stores in four states, Christensen says he can look at car counts or tire sales company wide, or focus on a single store. He can drill down to a specifc market, and if there are multiple stores in that same market, see if one location is under-performing compared to the other.
When customers come in with a promotional item, whether it’s an email or postcard, the dealer tracks it, giving Graham Tire real data to show whether oil change reminders are more successful than other service reminders, or if emails are reaching more people than postcards. (Some might dismiss postcards in this digital age, but Christensen says the four-color cards remain efective. “It puts us on the kitchen table.”)
“It’s very valuable. We cannot be that efective managing it ourselves,” Christensen says. “He’s an expert at it. We may be very good at servicing a customer’s vehicle. We are not data-based mining people.
“We try to utilize it. It is our customers. We want to be cognizant, have we lost customers? Do we have lapsed customers? We try to do some sort of action to follow up to that customer. We invite them to contact us. Some of them leave because they might have been upset by an event. We invite them to share back if they were dissatisfed with something.”
Don’t give up on the telephone
With all the focus on websites, online selling and digital databases, it’s easy to overlook some of the “old school” tools of the trade — like the telephone.
Katherine Worwa, a marketer for Century Interactive LC, says “everything revolves around the phone.”
Century Interactive is a call-tracking company, with 50,000 real people listening to incoming and outgoing phone calls at businesses. At frst the service was geared only toward sales, especially at car dealerships, but its Service Seter product focuses on that “other” side of business.
During a call, the monitor hones in on how consumers discover a business, whether it’s from a television commercial, a listing in the Yellow Pages or a Facebook ad. Te monitor gauges how well employees are engaging customers on the telephone, tracks the kind of information callers want and measures how ofen callers aren’t routed to the right person. If a call doesn’t go well, it sends an alert to the dealer or manager who can then try to recover that sale or service appointment immediately. Managers can see which employees aren’t performing well and ofer them tips. Service Seter says as employees improve on the phone they’ll be able to convert more calls to service appointments.
Worwa says, “It takes on average seven to nine outbound calls to reconnect to a customer that maybe lef a voicemail or a message with the receptionist, so connecting that inbound call with the resource is important.” ■
