In this competitive world of automobile industry, customer service is driving more sales to maximise sales and profitability. Customer Service is a key differentiator in attracting new customers to deepen the relationships with existing ones.
what Lakshmiu Tatikonda wrote in the Management Account Quarterly -
"5% increase in CSAT and retention tends to add between 25% — 85% of the bottom line based on various factors. Investing in customer service hence appears to be a no-brainer".
There are various challenges faced by automotive dealerships looking to compete and differentiate in a crowded marketplace.
Challenge: Staffing in automobile industry
This is the first and a typical problem that we cannot avoid. Most of the calls tend to be inquiries or scheduling and complaints. These can be easily addressed using automation and two-thirds of these are being handled in offline ways by leveraging social media.
Challenge: Training
Training is a crucial aspect of great customer service. Any customer service or support manager will tell you that it is almost impossible to get an even level. Most customer service KPIs tie back to the training of the Customer service representative.
Challenge: Always on engagement
There are limitations to building a customer service organisation that is always available when a customer needs it. We do not have a specific time when we drive. It is usual during office hours but there can be emergencies or sudden plans. Unless an auto dealership is big enough or has many points of presence, staffing for a 24 x 7 cycle is cost-prohibitive, which is clearly not sustainable.
Challenge: Spend on technology and infrastructure
Any organisation needs to acquire and pay for hardware and software to run the customer service function. In the current era, the costs of customer service scale exponentially based on business growth. So the bigger you are, the more issues customer service faces and the Customer Satisfaction traditionally measured with metrics like CSAT gets lower.
Challenge: Costs
A big issue that automobile dealerships are grappling with is how to contain costs and how to derive a respectable ROI from customer service investments.
Challenge: Deepening relationships
Focusing on customer service leads to better retention. Moreover, it's a way to deepen customer relationships with automated intelligent handovers. The traditional way to do it the best way is face to face but it is a cumbersome process.
Challenge: Outbound sales and discounts
A typical issue faced by many dealerships is communication and marketing. Chat platforms have the broadest utilisation and reach among all interaction channels. It's difficult to match the span of Facebook with 1.4 billion people online.
Challenge: Expanding the customer base
Given that social channels now are the most broad-based, it pays increasingly to use them to expand reach. As a result, this is making it much easier to target a channel that gets used multiple times a day.
If you are looking to overcome all these challenges, having a Facebook Messenger Chatbot would be a very low-cost solution. After this, you might want to look at some ways to improve Automobile industry sales.
Come and explore the world of Engati. It is an exciting new way of approaching customer service, which has a benchmark to reduce 92% of service costs. 10 minutes of your time can have your bot working for you. The earlier you sign up for a trial the quicker your automotive bot will start learning.
To know more, schedule a FREE demo today!