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We all know that building a successful car dealership takes time, patience, and hard work. Business owners work tirelessly to ensure they are consistently providing unbeatable customer service, securing a first-class reputation, and of course, generating sales, which in turn, results in regular profits being made. What often gets forgotten though, is the importance of creating trust. Trust is at the heart of every successful car dealership and as a business owner, gaining trust from customers should be weaved into the foundations of everything you do.
Ultimately, when a car dealership successfully builds that required trust, it encourages customers to return for business in the future. And with more than 16,000 car dealers across America, competition between businesses is at its highest and with so many dealerships to choose from, shoppers want the decision to be as stress-free and seamless as possible. As a business, if you have invested the time in building a solid trustworthy relationship with customers, it will prove beneficial to both you and them, when it comes to which car dealership the client chooses to give business to.
Of course, building trust with customers undoubtedly helps to improve brand reputation as well. This is because word-of-mouth marketing can still be the difference between securing a sale at your car dealership, or not. Put it this way, if you create a trusting relationship with one customer, then realistically, you’re probably getting engagement from five of their friends and family too, who they have recommended you to. It’s a no-brainer, building trust is everything.
While we’ve established the significance of creating customer trust, it’s important to consider which of your teams should be focussing on making this a priority. While your sales team seems like the obvious choice, it might surprise you that your service department must be just as aware of how to create trust with the customers they engage with, too. Simply put, in harder times economically, it is the service department that will keep your dealership afloat. For this reason alone, your service department needs to be able to guarantee customer return and shopper recommendations.
In today’s digital age, every service department should be using videos to help build trust with customers. Built with car dealerships in mind, the SnapCell app allows technicians to engage and efficiently communicate with customers via the power of video. So who better than our team of experts here at SnapCell to help expand on this and explain why video creation will play such a key role in generating and improving customer trust at your dealership.
Video Communication Makes Things Easier
It’s as simple as it sounds: using video makes communicating with customers easier. Imagine if a customer can leave their car with a technician in a service department, then go about their everyday life, before picking their vehicle back up when it’s ready. With so many people living increasingly busier lives, customers crave that easy journey, especially when it comes to things like getting work done on their car. If a technician can make a job as seamless as possible, it is guaranteed to create trust with the customer.
Gone are the days whereby a customer needs to sit by the phone waiting for a call to let them know the work is complete, or in some cases, the job will be bigger than anticipated so might take slightly longer. Thanks to the revolutionary SnapCell app, technicians can now stay in regular contact with customers, keeping them updated as and when required, by simply sending videos via a message on their smartphone or in an email. The value of this feature really cannot be underestimated. Not only will customers welcome the practicality of being able to communicate with the technician while on the go but the SnapCell app will give them peace of mind that their car is in safe hands. Plus, knowing exactly what work is being done to their car proves invaluable when it comes to building customer trust.
Business owners, don’t be put off by the word ‘video’ either because when it comes to your technicians stitching together a professional-looking clip for customers, the SnapCell app makes it easier than ever. Technicians can create an engaging and informative video, complete with key vehicle snapshots and commentary by the simple push of a button.
Providing Transparency, Honesty, and Regular Updates
In some cases, it will be the Service Advisor team who directly communicates with customers and the technician might never actually meet the owner of the car they are working on. This can understandably be concerning for customers, so why not introduce videos to help overcome this? Even if a technician has met the customer in person, creating a video of the work that needs to be carried out on a vehicle instantly creates transparency, leading to immediate trust from customers.
Why should the communication stop there? After all, trust is hard to gain but easy to lose. Being able to provide the customer with key regular updates throughout the whole job plays a key role in building and developing that trust with a customer. Doing this via video footage takes things up a gear, putting your dealership one step ahead of the competition.
Furthermore, when looking for a trustworthy technician, a customer is likely to ask if they will be contacted if there any unexpected repairs are needed. Thanks to the SnapCell app, technicians can confidentially answer yes, giving customers total peace of mind when leaving their car. With as many as 70 percent of customers believing they would be taken advantage of when taking their car to a technician for servicing or a repair, it’s pivotal that dealerships do all they can to give shoppers total peace of mind. By using SnapCell, technicians can easily create and send videos, explaining what extra labor is required, for the customer to sign off within minutes before any additional work is carried out. For the customer, knowing that they will be kept regularly up to date with ongoing and unpredictable work, will prove invaluable.
Diagnosing a Problem
Creating video footage is much more efficient and powerful than text communication with a customer. A great example of this is technicians being able to replicate a problem described by the customer before diagnosing a problem. In instances like these, imagine a customer could come into a dealership and describe a funny noise they have noticed their car is making. The technician can then re-create the problem described and film it, along with the cause, using tools like the SnapCell app, before sending it across to the customer. From there, the two-way communication between the technician and customer will ensure the correct problem is diagnosed and the client is informed of any work that needs completing, as well as how much it will cost and the predicted time it will take, ahead of signing it off.
Encourage Reviews
Despite all of the advances in technology, one of the best forms of marketing continues to be word of mouth and customer reviews. In fact, nine out of 10 customers admit to reading reviews before choosing to shop with a business.
This huge statistic alone highlights the importance of encouraging positive online reviews from customers, to develop further trust in your service department, from both current and potential shoppers. A great way to encourage online reviews and better still, customer retention, is by sending customers a recorded thank you message, following any work your dealership does on their car. The ReputationBuddy feature on SnapCell allows you to do just that. Your dealership can use targeted ‘thank you’ videos to secure more reviews with a direct link to your testimonial pages, which will also help to improve your ranking on Google too.
Social Media
Like customer reviews, social media plays a huge role in engaging with your target audience and ultimately creating that much-needed trust from customers. What’s more, 65 percent of consumers make a purchase after watching branded social videos. This might be because viewers retain 95 percent of a message when they watch it in a video compared to just 10 percent when reading it in text.
Using videos across your dealership’s social platforms will undoubtedly increase trust from customers and will ultimately generate a rise in sales.
Creating video content that can be utilized across your social media channels can often seem time-consuming and overwhelming. There are plenty of readily available tools on the market which can help you produce high-quality footage efficiently and quickly. Take SocialBoost on SnapCell, for example, which integrates seamlessly with a dealership’s social networks, making it easier than ever for staff to add video content at the simple push of a button.
It’s clear that using videos will certainly help boost the trust between a customer and your service department. Find out how SnapCell can help your technicians effortlessly integrate video creation into their day-to-day role, which will not only improve customer experience but ultimately generate sales too. Get in touch and arrange a free demonstration of our SnapCell app today.
