Driving Long-Term Dealer Profitability

  • Purchase and Delivery Satisfaction Improvement Among Preowned Vehicle Customers
    Who’s ensuring that your preowned vehicle customers are as satisfied as those buying a new vehicle? Are you missing an opportunity to make sure that your preowned 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 manufacturers 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.
 

Purchase and Delivery Satisfaction Program for Preowned Vehicle Customers

Decision Analyst designs and conducts customer surveys for individual dealer franchises, providing valuable information on preowned 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 a number of ways or in combination. For example, a survey could be sent out by mail with a URL provided so that customers may choose to complete the survey by mail or online.

Innovation Services for Advertising Research

Once basic consumer motivations are understood and some of the basic elements of strategy are defined, consumers can then be used to help in the advertising development process. Not just any consumers will do. Highly creative individuals are the key. They can help create “starter” ideas for breakthrough advertising. Decision Analyst maintains a panel of more than 2,000 highly creative people (called Imaginators®) who work in small groups, online or offline, to generate hundreds of advertising ideas for a brand. Naturally, these starter ideas must be developed into final ads by agencies and should go through standard copy-testing procedures.

Data-Collection Systems

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

  • Phone
  • Mail
  • In-Person
 
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

The Advanced Analytics and Predictive Analytics Departments at Decision Analyst 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 four decades of experience in automotive and customer satisfaction research. We are uniquely qualified to develop, manage, administer, and analyze your Preowned Vehicle Sales and Delivery Satisfaction program. Our expertise in analytical research systems gives us the ability to go beyond simply obtaining customer satisfaction data; we can also determine how to best utilize the data to maximize customer retention and loyalty.

Innovation, Analytics, and Research Services

If you would like more information on conducting Automotive Research, please contact Heather Kluter, Senior Vice President (hkluter@decisionanalyst.com), or Bonnie Janzen, Executive Vice President (bjanzen@decisionanalyst.com), or call 1-800-ANALYSIS (262-5974) or 1-817-640-6166.

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