A lack of new vehicle models and higher prices for used car inventory due to COVID-19 has paved a way forward for fixed ops to finally step into the limelight.
COVID-19 has been the awakening of fixed ops and it is now finally getting its fifteen minutes of fame, according to Lauren Donalson, Senior Director of Accounts, National, PureCars.
Donalson is known as the drummer of the fixed ops parade within PureCars due to her background, in which she primarily worked in parts and service retention — including with Toyota manufacturing.
“As champion of all things fixed ops here, it’s been a drum that I’ve been beating for years and I genuinely believe this is the year of fixed ops,” said Donalson in an interview with Canadian auto dealer. “We’ve definitely seen dealers gravitate more towards fixed ops advertising in the last six months than in the last six years.”
That gravitation is due in large part to the COVID ripple effect on the auto industry: limited inventory on the new car side, and difficulty in acquiring used vehicles due to increased wholesale auction prices in recent months.
Donalson said dealers are willing to serve customers in ways they may not have been willing to in years past with things like complementary pick-up and drop-off, and improved sanitation practices — information customers are still really keen on understanding before they turn their vehicle over for service.
Websites, social media & GMB
Most dealers have already addressed this on their website in the form of prominent displays of complementary pick-up and drop-off, along with “read more” links to in-dealership safety and health measures. But they can take this a step further by having the information integrated in all of their advertising messaging.
“You can do things like branding messaging and social; you can certainly integrate that type of ad copy into your paid search campaigns as well,” said Donalson. “I would absolutely advise addressing it in your Google My Business (GMB) listings, making sure your parts and service departments have their own departmental listings with the GMB.”
Dealers should also ensure their COVID-19 precautions are highlighted in the Q&A portion of GMB, and ensure they are posting regularly about what they are doing to address health and safety concerns for customers. These are key measures that should be taken care of today, and that resonate with customers.
The social advertising branding campaigns can be as simple as a walk-around video shot on an iPhone/Android showing the different in-store health and safety measures being implemented. Donalson said these types of videos are oftentimes low-budget, and some have even gone viral in the past six months.
Dealers need to find ways to meet one of the key challenges between retailers and consumers — and that challenge, according to Donalson, is time, and money. She said they need to make the argument to the customer that they are not going to waste either of those two factors.
“What we find works, again honing in on the advertising piece of it, is to focus on messages like: ‘We’re going to fix it right the first time with our certified technician.’ That’s going to address the time piece,” said Donalson. “The money piece — I’d say advertising offers like, ‘We will meet or beat any advertised price.’”
Overall, Donalson listed three main areas that she considers to be the “keys to success” moving forward:
making sure offers are displayed on a month-to-month basis on the dealership website;
making sure paid search campaigns are running so dealers can take advantage of customers actively searching for their business;
and making sure dealers are pumping out messages on how the dealership is taking care of the customer’s vehicle, and the sanitation of the store.
Mobile-first & check-in
Keeping dealership websites, social media platforms and GMB up-to-date is part of a broader solution to boost the fixed ops department. Another piece of that puzzle includes the use of modern tools that customers can interact with — such as mobile check-in.
“From a dealership perspective, they’ve got to support online scheduling, mobile check-in and self-service check-in, online communications, mobile payments — every step of that experience has to be, now, a digital one, and beyond digital, a mobile first experience,” said Bill Lucchini, CEO of Dealer-FX.
Lucchini said the digital aspect has moved from a “nice-to-have” and differentiator to a requirement, and that dealers will separate themselves by who adopts this best. The question is, how many have adopted the mobile-first aspect of that customer experience, and do they have it under control?
“What I would say is generally no. And there are a couple of reasons for that,” said Lucchini. “There haven’t been a lot of tools historically that deliver well on that mobile-first experience. When I think about it, what dealers need to do is adopt software as a service (SaaS), and mobile technology. And the mobile tools have been lacking.”
Lucchini said software vendors need to focus their developments on ensuring these types of tools work well together. He also said it is up to the software vendors to provide dealerships with “great tools,” although once this is accomplished, the responsibility then turns to the dealerships to adopt, implement, and roll them out effectively with their customer base.
Dealer-FX rolled out mobile check-in back in April after accelerating its plans for a June deployment due to the pandemic. The timing could not have been better; the feature allows consumers to avoid face-to-face interactions when bringing their vehicle in for service by checking-in with their mobile phone. It’s a win-win for everyone.
A key component of mobile check-in is to ensure that the tool is customer-friendly, while also embodying the dealership process — and part of that process includes those moments when a customer enters the store, counselling the dealer on what their vehicle needs, according to Lucchini.
“The process for doing that raises the dollars per RO (repair order) and is really important to a dealership’s profitability,” said Lucchini.
Dealer-FX discovered that, with the rollout of its mobile check-in (when customers check-in on their mobile device) consumers spend $20 more than when they check-in with a service advisor.
“That’s an indication that customers do want to take care of their car,” said Lucchini. “And when the tool works right, it helps the dealership succeed in their goals.”
Lucchini believes the value of mobile check-in is that it can enable the service advisor by taking transactional work off their plate and allowing them to focus more on the customer relationship — discussions about repairs, answering their questions, and so on.
This way, the customer receives a better quality experience and is more likely to return to the dealership.
Mobility services
Dealers may also need to focus on mobility services to help boost profits within their fixed ops departments, and although that may seem odd in some provinces amid COVID-19, there is a good argument for it.
Jean-Marc Turk, Co-founder and Business Development, ShuttleControl, first advises dealers to understand where their return on investment (ROI) is.
“If you’re going to be improving your dealership and you want to invest in technology, invest in things that have a clear ROI,” said Turk. “Things like, you’re telling me, with this offer I can lower the amount of time my technician is spending on a vehicle for X or Y, Z reasons. Let me try it out for free or for a discounted price, and let me actually see what it looks like on the books.”
Turk said this may be the best type of investment dealers can make now, when their bottom line is not what it was last year but the dealer still wants to stay ahead of the game.
ShuttleControl is a mobility platform for business that is active in both the United States and Canada. It helps dealerships address situations where they have someone on the road, either dealing with clients, taking care of trades, or any other type of mobility operation.
Turk believes the future will see more people on the road that will need this type of service, and if dealers do not take advantage of it, third-party players will eat into their client base.
Of course, that also depends on the market; mobility services are typically needed more in rural than urban areas. But as more people shift their living arrangements from urban to rural due to the pandemic, there is opportunity for dealers to offer these services while managing costs during and post-crisis.
“What we have been able to see in terms of mobility operations is simple things like, how much am I spending on gas?” said Turk. “If I’m putting on X amount of kilometres a month — if I can just make sure that I am doing the same amount of work that my driver is doing, but putting less kilometres on my vehicle, maybe I can do the same work with one driver instead of two, especially if demand is a bit down for COVID.”
Turk said whatever changes the dealership makes to lower its costs on the mobility front should be implemented in the store as a process that remains in place amid the pandemic, and also when the dealership begins increasing the frequency of its operations again.
“With tire season coming up, and it’s our first tire season with COVID — it’s a great time, because potentially it is a bit lower demand, to be trying these things out at a dealership,” said Turk.
He said implementing something like this when it is not overly busy at the dealership, at the end of the day, will pay dividends not just now, but over years.
