Xtime Performance Manager Tiffani Stefanescu provides a step-by-step overview to help you and your team create well-organized, professional video walkarounds, with tips for preparing for your presentation, looking professional for the customer, and useful talk tracks.
At Dealer.com we believe partnership and accountability are key to lasting success at your dealership.
That’s why we have a talented team of Performance Managers to offer expert digital marketing for car dealers. From delivering monthly insights to tweak your short-term digital marketing strategy, to ensuring you’re using our technology to seize every opportunity, your Performance Manager is always focused on your success.
Are you already a Dealer.com and want to know how to best partner with your Performance Manager? Or are you thinking about partnering with the only end-to-end digital marketing in the industry? Here’s an overview of how our digital marketing experts can give you the tools to run a successful dealership.
What to Expect
You can expect your Digital Storefront Performance Manager to work with your team to show you the dos and don’ts of digital marketing and retailing, the strategies that drive sales, and the winning formulas that have worked with other dealers. With Dealer.com, you get
The Power of True Digital Marketing Partnership
Your Digital Storefront Performance Manager is always focused on your dealership’s success. Through regular consultation meetings, you get expert digital marketing and digital retailing advice and insights to customize your digital marketing strategy and ensure that you’re getting the most out of your solution to seize every sales opportunity.
“We could not be happier with our experience from the website management to the automotive digital advertising. But most importantly the genuine team effort that our Performance Managers bring to the table.”
Kara Berry Marketing & Communications Coordinator, Keller Ford, Michigan
Get The Most from Performance Management
With an average of at least three years of experience in automotive sales, Digital Storefront Performance Managers deliver digital marketing expertise, unrivaled industry knowledge, and a unique understanding of Cox Automotive technologies to help you run a successful digital dealership. Follow a dedicated support model with a team comprised of directors, managers, and digital marketers committed to implementing strategy changes.
Ready to put the power and expertise of our Digital Storefront Performance Managers to work for your dealership? Schedule a consultation today.
At Napleton Auto Group, a five-store dealership in Wisconsin and Illinois, people come first. It’s not just a slogan. The auto group sincerely believes that when you put people first — customers and staff alike — success follows. Customers return regularly, and employees find fulfillment in the workplace.
Napleton goes the extra mile to implement a proven people-first plan. They support their team with the right tools and time-saving technology to ensure high customer satisfaction, transparency, and trust.
Time-saving Technology
As a company that respects their customers’ time, Napleton Auto Group wanted a service technology that would give customers more control over their experience — a technology that would allow customers to quickly and easily schedule a service appointment directly from the dealership website.
Napleton turned to Xtime to save time and simplify the service scheduling process. Giving customers the ability to book appointments on their own terms has provided the auto group more control of workflow and shop capacity, ensuring a speedy, highly efficient service experience. Napleton also uses Xtime to send service recommendations with pictures and video, streamlining the approval and payment process, further growing efficiencies.
Above and beyond the conveniences and advantages of the technology alone, Napleton Auto Group appreciates Xtime’s commitment to their success. Helpful sales reps and performance managers go out of their way to answer questions and provide key time-saving employee support — savings that eventually gets passed along to appreciative customers.
“If they don’t have the answer to all my questions, they know someone who does,” said Danny Randolph, President/Co-Owner of Napleton Auto Group. “It’s always easy to get an answer in the right amount of time in order for us to make quick decisions.”
Ensuring Satisfaction
“The customer comes first” has always been the first rule and the first step toward a successful sales and service strategy. But it’s also easier said than done. When push comes to shove, it’s easy to sacrifice service experience in favor of convenience. But Napleton Auto Group believes dealerships can do both.
With Xtime, customers get personalized check-ins, tablet reception, and the ability to review and approve service recommendations based on pictures and videos. All of these features work together to create the kind of service experience customers seek out. They build transparency into the service process, which in turn grows customer trust in your service department.
“Let’s be honest, car dealerships in past generations haven’t had the best reputation,” said Danny. “I think that’s really starting to change these days through trust and transparency. When you leverage systems like this that lay everything out for the customers … they trust it and they trust us more when we utilize tools like (Xtime).”
Thanks to Xtime, Napleton’s service employees are more engaged, and workflows are easier to manage while they provide a better service experience for customers. This focus on providing a superior service experience has resulted in more billable hours that have really added up and a faster, more efficient service experience for the auto group.
With the help of Xtime and connected Cox Automotive technologies, Napleton Auto Group continues to find success by taking care of their most important asset — people. Integrations between technologies save time, improve ease-of-use, and ensure a superior sales and service experience for customers and employees alike.
Ready to save time and give your customers a superior service experience like Napleton Auto Group? Book a demo to see how Xtime can help your dealership put your people first.
VinSolutions Performance Manager David Basil explains how Connect Automotive Intelligence helps you accelerate the path to purchase with Buying Signals that show you relevant vehicle recommendations that lead customers to the right car, sooner.
Learn more ways Connect Automotive Intelligence delivers unmatched insights that can help your dealership uncover more leads and improve the customer experience below.
Identifying the right sales software for your team can be challenging, especially because today’s solutions deliver much more value than yesterday’s CRMs.
This guide arms you with questions that will help you determine which solution provider offers the best capabilities in these categories:
Ready to find the best CRM for your needs?
According to research from Epsilon, 80% of consumers are more likely to make a purchase when brands offer personalized experiences. So there’s no question of if your dealership should offer shoppers personalized buying experiences, but many dealerships today are left wondering how.
Manually personalizing every email and landing page is complicated, expensive, and simply unrealistic for most dealerships. But innovative dealership marketing tools exist that make personalization at scale possible and profitable.
Watch this short video from Mo Zahabi, AVP of Sales Engineering at Cox Automotive, to learn how marketing automation can make a big difference for your bottom-line results.
See for yourself how Automotive Marketing Platform engages shoppers and boosts results.
Digital marketing is more important to your dealership’s success than ever before and has the potential to create highly personalized marketing experiences for your customers and drive sales.
As consumers demand more personalized marketing experiences and digital mediums become more expected, your dealership must stand out from your competition with a custom-built digital marketing strategy. And when it comes to creating the digital marketing strategy for your dealership you need experts to help get the job done.
Featuring top-notch agency-quality services that drive impressive sales and service opportunities, Marketing Services from Dealer.com help enhance your dealership’s marketing strategy to help get more car buyers to your website.
From everything to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to ensure you’re at the top of search results to original content that increases on-site engagement and aligns with your campaign strategy and dealership advertising goals, Marketing Services from Dealer.com is your one-stop-shop.
And if you’re already taking advantage of Marketing Services from Dealer.com, specifically Dealer.com Managed SEO and Content & Creative services – you’re doing great! But do you know the opportunities offered with our Premium SEO and Content & Creative Services?
Explore what Dealer.com Premium Managed SEO and Content & Creative can offer to take your digital marketing to the next level.
Dealer.com Managed Premium Content and Creative
Dealer.com Content and Creative packages allow dealers to create compelling, coordinated digital marketing campaigns with content that attracts more car buyers to your website.
Our Premium Content & Creative services are a cut above, giving you additional resources and campaigns to reach even more customers. With our premium services, you’ll have a dedicated campaign coordinator to provide strategic guidance and proactive campaign management and help summarize and analyze campaign performance.
And the more campaigns you send, the more people see your content and visit your website. With Premium Content & Creative, you get the opportunity to send even more integrated marketing campaigns each month to increase the traffic to your website.
Dealer.com Managed Premium SEO
Although 88% of buyers use the internet to shop for cars, 91.5% of consumers click on a result from the first page of search results, so if you’re not on top, you’re not being seen.* That’s why Dealer.com Managed SEO helps drive your dealership to the top of the search engine results pages, differentiate you from the competition, enhance the volume and quality of your website traffic, and generate more leads for your dealership website.
But did you know upgrading your current SEO service could give you even more? Our Dealer.com Managed Premium SEO service assures your website is at the top of highly competitive organic searches to generate even more high-quality traffic and leads to your website.
In fact, Dealers using Premium SEO experience 52% more VDP views, 30% more website views, 14% more form leads and 59% more phone leads.**
The market is ripe for dealers that do digital marketing right. Marketing Services from Dealer.com allows you to leverage the expertise of automotive marketing experts to deliver a specialized digital marketing strategy and campaigns aligned to your dealership’s goal.
Are you considering upgrading your services? Contact your performance manager to discuss our premium offerings and find out more here.
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**Source: Based on a study of 43 franchise dealerships running Premium SEO and Dealer.com Advertising for 12 consecutive months (Jun 2018 – May 2019). The analysis compared site performance during the 6-month period prior to adopting Premium SEO (Dec 2017 – May 2018) to the 6-month period after adopting Premium SEO (Dec 2018 – May 2019) .
Customers expect personalized, relevant marketing from dealerships. But delivering personalization at scale—while balancing multiple departments, tools, and staff members—is often challenging.
Automotive Marketing Platform powered by VinSolutions simplifies marketing processes, engages customers, and delivers personalized marketing experiences across the ownership lifecycle with advanced data insights, automated workflows, and the hands-on support of a Marketing Account Manager.
Dealers with Automotive Marketing Platform see an average return of nearly seven times their investment in the tool, based on analysis of VinSolutions dealers with Automotive Marketing Platform powered by VinSolutions from June 2020 to November 2021.
See for yourself how Automotive Marketing Platform engages shoppers and boosts results.
Marketing moves fast. The tools, tactics, and technologies that were effective just a few years ago have given way to new approaches that prioritize personalization. It’s no longer all about the business—it’s about what your business can do for your shoppers.
Traditional dealership marketing tactics, like birthday cards and purchase anniversary emails, aren’t cutting it anymore. Today’s consumers expect your dealership to provide real value with every interaction. They want personalized, relevant marketing that meets their needs, when they need it.
Failing to provide the experience shoppers expect means limiting your sales potential. Is your dealership’s marketing meeting consumers’ expectations, or is it holding you back? It isn’t always easy to identify when there might be a problem.
Whether you think your marketing is doing just fine or you know you have room for improvement, keep reading for six signs that your marketing might be limiting your success.
1. You’re Seeing Declining Marketing Results
Let’s start with the most obvious sign first: declining marketing results. Marketing—and the technology that powers personalized customer connections—moves pretty fast. It can be a lot for any dealership marketing team to keep up with constant changes.
Falling behind the marketing times often results in poor or declining marketing results from your website and digital advertising, fewer calls, less traffic, and fewer unique hits.
The key to reversing declining marketing results is getting to the true root cause of the problem. Whether the issue is your technology, your messages, the way you’re using your budget, or some combination, identifying specific problem areas is a crucial first step. Making changes—even sweeping ones—when you don’t know what is underperforming probably won’t help.
2. You’re Having Difficulty Tracking ROI
A solid understanding of your marketing ROI can give you an accurate, data-driven picture of where you are and where you’re going. It can help you make course corrections and understand what kinds of messages are most effective at engaging your customers. Unfortunately, another sign that your marketing might be holding you back is that you don’t know how your marketing is performing or it is very difficult to track.
Non-integrated marketing tools make monitoring marketing campaigns cumbersome. It requires pulling information from fragmented systems and compiling and comparing data to determine marketing effectiveness.
When you streamline your auto dealership software and your marketing vendors, however, you also streamline your ability to monitor your marketing campaigns. You can quickly make changes to poor performing campaigns and make strategic marketing decisions across your entire business. Simplification of systems equals simplification of tracking marketing effectiveness.
3. You Have a Fragmented, Generic Marketing Approach
To truly personalize your marketing, you have to rely on tools and data to give you insights about your shoppers. If you have an incomplete view of your consumers, that is impossible to do. Without the right data, you’re forced to deliver disjointed, generic marketing. This type of marketing treats every consumer the same—sending the same standard messages into the universe, hoping that something sticks.
Using multiple software tools from multiple marketing vendors often creates disjointed marketing messages. These multiple tools and vendors might get the job done in a roundabout way, but they’re also unnecessarily expensive and not very good at communicating or sharing data with each other.
The solution to disjointed marketing is to streamline your software tools. Rather than trying to balance multiple marketing vendors and tools that don’t speak to each other, find an automotive marketing solution that lets you quickly and easily leverage shopper data to personalize marketing campaigns with relevant and timely content.
4. You Rely Solely on Third-Party Data
Many advertising technologies today rely on third-party cookies to find, track, and reach consumers. But many major web browsers—including Google’s popular Chrome browser—have stopped or plan to stop allowing third-party tracking cookies.
If your automotive marketing solutions rely solely on third-party cookies rather than your own first-party data, your marketing will soon be in trouble. And even before cookies become obsolete, relying on third-party data means you’re missing out on valuable opportunities to personalize shopper journeys and connect online and in-store experiences.
Fortunately, there is a solution to this problem. While third-party data becomes more regulated and less useful, your dealership’s own customer data (known as first-party data) and the data supplied by partners (known as second-party data) will become more valuable. Using data that your dealership gathers through its own consumer interactions, you can reach specific consumers more effectively with personalized marketing messages.
To reach a broader population, you’ll want to partner with trusted vendors that integrate with highly visited third-party consumer sites, such as Kelley Blue Book and Autotrader. With a robust set of first- and second-party data, you can smoothly transition away from third-party cookies without losing the ability to personalize your message and marketing approach.
5. You Have to Manually Execute Everything Yourself
There’s no way around it; delivering the type of marketing that today’s consumers expect is complicated. Personalizing marketing requires using a variety of data and tools, and doing it all manually and on your own is often a painful experience—for you and your shoppers. If you’re executing all your marketing strategies manually, you’re likely missing out on opportunities to improve efficiency and return.
Automation is dealership marketer’s friend. By automating your marketing workflows, you can deliver dynamic, proactive, and personalized content to consumers, without having to manually manage and execute every step.
And because automated marketing content and timing is informed by real-time data about each shopper, you can know that you’re delivering the right message, to the right person, at the right time. Plus, the follow-up for best next steps in reaching out to your shoppers is already in motion.
Beyond automation, look for vendors who provide experienced marketing support. A marketing account manager—someone who is experienced in the industry—can help ensure your marketing is executed in a way that aligns with your strategy, as well as keep you up to date on best practices and changes in technology.
A good marketing account manager can help your dealership implement the right tools, get the most out of those tools, and ensure that you’re maximizing your marketing investment—giving you more time to focus on selling cars.
6. Your Marketing Solution Isn’t Integrated with Your CRM
When your dealer CRM and marketing tools don’t share data, your sales team can be left in the dark, not knowing what marketing shoppers have seen and engaged with.
But when your marketing solution integrates with your CRM, your sales team is equipped with more information to help them connect with consumers and close deals. In addition to having shopper data at the ready, your sales team can see all personalized marketing activity that has reached each consumer.
Instead of having to check both the CRM and a separate marketing tool, robust integration between tools lets your team leverage real-time shopper data and activity directly from the CRM customer record. It streamlines sales workflows and allows your team to be more informed in their conversations and assigned tasks.
Get More from Your Marketing
Is your marketing holding you back? Are all the signs and symptoms pointing to lack of personalization and integration in your marketing approach? If so, how do you get back on the path to better profits with more personalized marketing messages meant for each individual shopper?
A modern marketing solution—one with advanced data insights, automated workflows, seamless CRM integration, and the hands-on support of a marketing account manager—can help you engage buyers by delivering the right message at the right time, every time.
Webinar | Reach Todays Buyer’s with Intelligent Marketing
It’s the trifecta of service department success — your customers, your team, your dealership. When your service department prioritizes all three, you win.
But, how do you triumph in this balancing act? Technology. Specifically, your service scheduling technology. It initiates the entire service experience and brings all three priorities together from the onset.
So, let’s make sure you have the right solution in place.
Evaluate your service scheduling technology with the following Q&A, curated to help you deliver the experience expected of your service department, internally and externally, today. Does your technology meet the needs of your customers, your service team, and your dealership?
Key Consideration 1: Your Customers
Question: Is there digital-to-in-store continuity for customers?
Answer: Customers need to see and hear the same service recommendations and pricing at every touchpoint, from booking and check-in to approval and payment. With the right technology, your customers will see the same recommendations with the same quoted price throughout the service process, creating continuity and building trust.
Question: Can I streamline the customer experience and reduce check-in and wait times?
Answer: To do so, you need to control the flow of customers into your service department. The right scheduling tool will help you balance your day, reducing bottlenecks during the most sought-after appointment times. Your technology should also facilitate your customers’ ability to make decisions about repairs during the scheduling process. When your customers have every piece of necessary information, including services that are currently due on their vehicles, open recalls, and previously declined services, you can streamline and optimize their experience.
Question: How do I create a more individualized experience for service customers?
Answer: Personalize everything — reminders, notifications, and all communications leading up to and throughout the service process. Your technology should even facilitate your ability to greet the customer by name when they pull into the service drive. Personalization increases the quality of customer interactions.
Question: How can I make the service process easier and more convenient for my customers?
Answer: In addition to fast appointment booking from anywhere, anytime, your customers need vehicle service to fit into their busy schedules. The ultimate service experience begins with scheduling technology that incorporates transportation options like service pickup and delivery.
Question: How can I improve the service experience to increase customer satisfaction and retention?
Answer: Customer satisfaction is a function of convenience, transparency, and trust. Find service technology that facilitates all three to keep customers coming back with advanced capabilities like rideshare or pickup and delivery, and flexible customer financing.
Key Consideration 2: Your Service Team
Question: What’s the best way to maximize my team’s productivity?
Answer: Help your service department reach its potential with robust shop management.
Manage capacity for a steady flow of appointments, balancing your day and reducing peak-time bottlenecks. You service scheduling technology should help you visualize capacity so you can adjust when needed for optimum daily service business, while accounting for the scope of skill-specific services to create an efficient and productive workload for technicians.
Question: How do I know it’s the right scheduling tool for my team?
Answer: The right solution will be easy to use, provide helpful support, and boost the efficiency of your team. User-friendly tools include intuitive interfaces that look like the technology your team interacts with in their everyday lives.
Question: How can I ensure that all service-related calls are answered in a timely fashion and my team isn’t overwhelmed with too many calls?
Answer: Implement tools that allow customers to quickly schedule service online and communicate with your dealership digitally. These tools should free up time for advisors and technicians to focus on customers.
Question: Can I help my staff to organize their day and be more efficient?
Answer: Your team should be able to get a sense of appointments, walk-ins, and waiters to help prioritize and organize their day with a scheduling solution that also allows you to load your shop in a manner that maximizes your service department’s potential. Look for the ability to designate the scope of skill-specific services to create an efficient and productive workload for technicians.
Question: Is there a way to identify and capture more recalls?
Answer: Yes — automate recall identification. Your technology should actively search each VIN for open recall campaigns during appointment scheduling, whether it’s done online by the consumer or internally by your team, and at check-in. This functionality identifies all service needs up front, gives your team helpful recall prompts, no matter how busy the service drive, and helps you properly manage capacity to ensure more recall business.
Key Consideration 3: Your Dealership
Question: How do I address poor scheduling practices that result in inefficient ROs?
Answer: Manage shop capacity so that your team can maximize every RO. You may miss out on additional service recommendations if your capacity is not optimized for top performance — find technology to help you place daily caps on your less efficient service work and support your team’s ability to thoroughly inspect each vehicle.
Question: Should I expect a good return on investment from my scheduling technology?
Answer: Yes, you certainly should. The key is a scheduling solution that displays previously declined services and open recalls from the outset, so customers can browse options and book and approve services before their vehicle ever arrives at your shop. And, because this information is also visible to service advisors and BDC reps, your technology can help your team quote consistent pricing and keep your service drive running like a well-oiled, profit-producing machine. Convenient transportation options in the scheduling process also help drive your return on investment — a Cox Automotive study showed consumers using service pickup and delivery spent $275 more per RO.
Question: How do I give my customers the service experience they expect?
Answer: Driven by interactions with companies like Amazon and Starbucks, today’s customers expect to schedule their service appointment right from their phone with all the information they need at their fingertips. They are busy and appreciate convenience. Your scheduling technology should make online booking fast and easy and provide added time-saving benefits like service pickup and delivery.
Question: How do I know if my current scheduling solution is outdated?
Answer: First, confirm the tool you’re using was actually created to facilitate a more efficient, productive, and profitable service drive. For instance, your dealership’s DMS was not meant to function as a scheduling tool and likely keeps you from delivering the digital, convenient service experience your customers expect today. The technology you need will help you control your shop capacity, automatically routing customers to the right advisor and specific services to the right technician. Not only does this promote more efficient workflows and generate additional revenue, it creates happier, more satisfied customers, leading to better online reviews and higher CSI scores.
Question: Is there a better way to recapture previously declined services and generate additional revenue?
Answer: Your service scheduling technology should automatically serve up previously declined services at the next customer interaction, reminding customers of recommendations at the beginning of the scheduling process, driving more fixed ops revenue and a better overall customer experience.
Conclusion
Your customers. Your team. Your dealership. When your scheduling technology works to elevate all three, you prevail, delivering on performance expectations both internally and externally. The questions above are your thought starters and a means to evaluate your service scheduling technology.
You can win the trifecta with the right service scheduling technology for your dealership. Book an Xtime Schedule demo today. Let’s get the conversation started.
