07_Great Dealership Test 2017

The new cars market has been growing, and the quality of customer service has been improving along with it. In this year’s Great Dealership Test, the average percentage result for meeting customer service quality standards at dealerships was higher than last year by over 5 percentage points.   The average result in this year’s edition  amounted to 80%, which seems to be a relatively high outcome.

Such a high result stems from several different causes. The first aspect is that dealership staff simply responded to visiting customers better. This year, sales staff and other dealership personnel were quicker  to notice and greet customers, as well as quicker and more apt in rendering their services. As a reminder, in the previous year one in five auditors had to wait before any of the staff approached them. Part of the improvement in this area can be attributed to a change in the internal arrangement of the dealerships (and the way their personnel works) by the introduction of a central reception desk where assistants  greet all arriving customers and take care of them right from the threshold. Is it possible that a better state of the market has allowed dealerships to invest in their staff and organise their premises more effectively?

Another aspect that received much better scores this year was the dealerships’ staff’s attitude to servicing prospective customers. Open conversations about the customer’s needs concerning their car (and intended means of usage), as well as addressing their issues at the subsequent stages of the sales conversation, occurred much more commonly this year. We’re happy to see an outcome like that, because we can’t imagine how a customer could receive a relevant offer, and be satisfied, if the sales staff proposed the same thing to every single person who comes to the dealership.

The final issue that we believe deserves emphasising, and that impacted this years improved result, was the test drive. Sales staff offered test drives more frequently, and ready to use test vehicles were much more commonly available, which boosted this year’s general score.  Nowadays, when a customer comes to a dealership they will likely already be equipped with considerable knowledge about the product from online research, and they will be looking for reassurance about their initial choices by means of experiencing the car and verifying how they feel about it during a test drive. Currently 46% of the dealerships included in the study received the highest score in this area, compared with only 9% in the previous year.  The significance of this is that test drives are offered to customers much more commonly now, and also that test drives are likely to take place during the same visit, with no need to make an appointment for another time. The credit for this goes to the sales staff, of course, but also to dealership owners and importers who took care to provide the right number of test vehicles and make them available to customers.

An aspect that hasn’t improved since the last edition pertains to the areas of customer service with regard to preparing a comprehensive offer, informing customers about the numerous options and opportunities to take advantage of additional services provided by the dealer, as well as preparing the offer itself. At the same time, this is the least favourably evaluated area in the project. Our other research tells us that customers expect dealers to make their life easier and take care of all other aspects such as insurance, financing, and trading in their old vehicle - all in one place, though in many cases they don't even realise what's available to them. Therefore the sales staff’s role is to lead the conversation in such a way that the customer feels that the dealership wants to help them, and that everything can be handled on the spot.

We also looked at the findings from the point of view of the consistency of customer service quality within the respective brand, or in other words, whether or not dealers of a given brand met the verified standards to the same, high extent. Brands from the fourth, fifth, and sixth position in the ranking, or BMW, Mazda, and Mitsubishi respectively, proved to be the most consistent this year. The difference between the most and least favourably evaluated dealerships of these brands were the lowest in the test, and amounted to between 11.6 and 13.6 percentage points. As a comparison, in cases of some brands, the least favourably evaluated dealership lagged 82 percentage points behind the best one.

Sales are growing and the market is in for another good year, so maybe even more funds will become available for investments in personnel and infrastructure, resulting in the next edition of the Great Dealership Test being a record breaker as well. In the next edition, we would like to see all of the brands at least on par with this year’s market average.

Please don’t hesitate to contact us:

Michał Roszkowski – Automotive Practice Head at Kantar TNS.

michal.roszkowski@tnsglobal.com