The Caine
Mutiny is a 1951 Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Herman
Wouk. The novel grew our of Wouk's personal experiences
aboard a destroyer-minesweeper in the Pacific in Word War II
and deals with among other things, the moral and ethical
decisions made at sea by the captains of ships. The mutiny
of the title is legalistic, not violent, and takes place
during an historic typhoon in December 1944. The
court-martial that results provides the dramatic climax to
the plot.
Much has been said about the current economic cloud that has
engulfed the automobile business. Some dealerships will
founder, some will run aground, and some will survive and
even grow. Those that are going to survive and grow will be
the ones that look for every opportunity that exists within
their dealership.
The dealership's best opportunity is the customer that is
sitting in front of the salesman or getting his repair order
written by the service advisor. Once you have a customer you
need to keep him for life. He needs to buy all the cars for
his family from your dealership. He needs to get all his
repair work done in your service department. Each and every
one of these customers needs to feel like he is the most
important customer you have.
Keeping in touch with your customers, finding out their
needs, resolving their problems is as important to the
survival of the dealership as drumming up new business. The
Business Development Center is the key to keeping these
relationships in tact. You can have mailers, run TV ads, run
newspaper ads, and you will reap some benefits. But most of
the cost of those approaches gets wasted on people who
either were already going to come back to the dealership, or
on people who will never come back to the dealership. The
BDC, in whatever form it takes, is the key to concentrating
on building these relationships and keeping these customers
for life.
The days where a salesman or a service advisor makes the
follow up calls and gets the information needed to build a
customer relationship are gone. They do not want to make the
call. They do not know how to make the call. They do not
know what to do with the information even if they are lucky
enough to gather the right information. The professionally
staffed BDC is the answer. Relationship building with your
customers, asking the right questions, knowing what is
available, and making personal contact with each customer is
what they do best.
There are many types and sizes of BDC and just as many if
not more metrics to measure their success. The one constant
is getting in touch with your customers. It is not going to
happen in most cases with one or two phone calls between 8
am and 5 pm. In this modern economy, contact will be more
successful after normal work hours. It may take 4 to 7
attempts to get through to your customers, or calling on a
Saturday morning. You may not be able to afford the staffing
that will get you these results. One option is a hybrid BDC,
with outsourced evening calls to your prospects and to firm
up your CSI scores, combined with a daytime staff to handle
phone ups and web ups and to take the information from the
outsourced calls and turn it into revenue.
Whatever your solution may be, the reality is in personal
and personalized contact with all of your existing customers
as well as the ones that just left the showroom or the
service department and converting them into revenue. You can
choose to be Captain BDC and put all of your resources where
they best serve your dealership. Or, you can be like Captain
Queeg, and focus on the "missing strawberry ice cream" and
lose sight of what is going to keep your ship afloat.
Robert W.
Smith is the founder & CEO of The Listener Group.
Contact Robert at:
rws@autolistener.com
http://www.autolistener.com
|
