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Driving Long-Term Dealer Profitability

Purchase and Delivery Satisfaction Improvement Among Pre-Owned Vehicle Customers

Who’s ensuring that your pre-owned vehicle customers are as satisfied as those buying a new vehicle? Are you missing an opportunity to make sure that your pre-owned vehicle customers are loyal customers too?

In the new vehicle market, information is available to help ensure high levels of customer satisfaction and loyalty. These are primarily manufacturer-sponsored customer survey programs in which dealer partners are compelled to participate. The best of these programs provide valuable information that dealers may use to train, evaluate, inspire, and compensate their sales staff and store management.

Sophisticated online information systems have been developed to keep the manufacturer and dealers current on new customer satisfaction levels and include comparisons and diagnostic measures to spot and correct sales purchase and delivery satisfaction problems quickly.

Typically, these programs ignore the pre-owned vehicle buyer. In most cases we find that there is a dearth of information on the sales experience of pre-owned vehicle buyers at the store level. This situation exists at a time when this information is needed as never before, since pre-owned vehicle sales have become much more important to dealership profitability than in the past. We believe the experiences of the pre-owned vehicle customer constitute an untapped opportunity for dealers to optimize their sales efforts in this market and will, in turn, lead to better long-term profitability for the dealers that utilize this tool.

Purchase and Delivery Satisfaction Program for Pre-Owned Vehicle Customers

Decision Analyst designs and conducts customer surveys for individual dealer franchises, providing valuable information on pre-owned vehicle buyers and typically covering topics that include the following:

Initial greeting
Availability of desired vehicle
Helpfulness of sales staff
Helpfulness of financial staff
Product knowledge of sales staff
Usefulness of financial options presented

Offer of demonstration drive
Explanation of vehicle features upon delivery
Courtesy of overall dealer staff
Preparation of the vehicle for delivery
Attractiveness of facilities
Overall satisfaction

Dealers simply provide a file (weekly or monthly) of buyer names and contact information. Decision Analyst conducts the surveys and provides online reporting of survey results and analytical consulting support. The surveys may be conducted in any of a number of ways or in combination. For example, surveys could be sent out by mail with URL's provided so that customers may choose to complete the survey by mail or online.

Data-Collection Systems

In addition to our extensive online data-collection capabilities, we also collect customer satisfaction data via:

Phone
Mail

In-Person
Interactive Voice Response (IVR)

Online Research Reporting Platform

Decision Analyst has a comprehensive, server-based system that manages survey reports. An integrated component of the Decision Analyst business intelligence framework, Logician® Online Reporting, combines data management capabilities to deliver real-time information. Logician® Online Reporting might include:

Topline results
Topline results with filtering options
Drill-down capability
Client-initiated cross-tabs
Client-initiated statistics

Export options (Excel, PDF)
Customized reports on any/all information existing in the database, including client-provided data.

Advanced Analytics and Predictive Analytics

These internal Decision Analyst departments provide advanced statistical and numerical analysis for the CSM practice area. Model construction, segmentation, customer valuation algorithms, and a wide range of other applications are applied using SAS, SPSS, and R-language statistical models.

The analysis of customer satisfaction data is more than looking at numbers; it’s looking at data in sophisticated ways to glean added value from it, such as key drivers of purchase satisfaction that may be utilized in training, evaluation, and compensation of your sales associates and managers.

Why Decision Analyst?

Decision Analyst is a leading marketing research and marketing consulting firm with over three decades of experience in automotive and customer satisfaction research. We are uniquely qualified to develop, manage, administer, and analyze your Pre-Owned Vehicle Sales and Delivery Satisfaction program. Our expertise in analytical research systems gives us the ability to go beyond the satisfaction data and see how customer satisfaction data fits into the bigger picture of customer retention and loyalty.

Automotive Marketing Research

If you would like more information on Automotive Research, please contact Allan Vivian, Vice President and Director of Automotive Research (avivian@decisionanalyst.com), or Bonnie Kenoly, Executive Vice President (bkenoly@decisionanalyst.com) or call 1-800-ANALYSIS (262-5974) or 1-817-640-6166.