By Alysha Webb, Editor and Publisher
Customer loyalty is something every dealership desires, and what the most successful dealerships inspire. General Motors has found that women customers are more loyal than men.
“If we treat [women] right, they can be that customer for life,” says Celeste D. Briggs, director of the Women’s Retail Network and of Diverse Dealer Programs in General Motors’ dealer development.
Dealerships are now competing on customer experience, and part of that experience is making their dealerships as woman-friendly as possible. That starts with having women working at every level in a dealership. GM’s Women’s Retail Network is helping make that a reality, and hopefully making dealerships more profitable.
“There is a lot of apprehension about buying a car and having it serviced,” Briggs tells Automotive Buy Sell Report. “If I can go to a place where they are concerned about me as a person that is a place where I would like to spend my money.”
The Women’s Retail Network helps women prepare to work in dealerships at every level and excel at their jobs. It creates 20 Groups, and offers scholarships for women to study different aspects of dealership management.
“We are looking at the entire dealership from technicians all the way up to dealer [principal],” says Briggs.
As women spread throughout the dealership world, WRN spreads with them. In 2015 it had a nationwide roll out of a service and parts manager forum after it found at least 260 women were working in that role at GM dealerships.
Succession is a topic on every dealer’s mind, and unlike earlier days, daughters are now seen as equally viable successors versus sons.
“I get calls from fathers who want to prepare their daughters for the business,” says Briggs.
So WRN created a 20 Group with NADA focused on next-generation women successors. There are seven families with daughters in the first Group, says Briggs.
“The youngest is 22” years old, she says.
The Women’s Retail Network is born
Briggs has cars in her blood. “We are a car family,” she says. “It has always been a part of our household. GM runs deep in the family history.”
She started working at GM in 1984 as a sales manager. There was only one women dealer in her district back then. By 1996, Briggs was back in Michigan working at headquarters in as a manager in Dealer Organization & Network Planning.
In 2001, GM produced a white paper that was to be the beginning of WRN. It looked at why there weren’t women in automotive retail at the same levels as in other industries. That became the Women’s Retail Initiative, the forerunner to WRN. Briggs was part of the inaugural team.
At that time, GM hadn’t even counted the number of women dealers in its network.
“We started looking and they were everywhere,” says Briggs, “wherever we had dealerships that were family-owned there were women taking over the reins, often through a tragedy.”
The Women’s Retail Initiative had its first meeting in 2002. It was the first time these women had been brought together as a group. They immediately started to network, “as women naturally do,” says Briggs. They began having annual meetings, and formed an all-women 20 Group with ADP.
GM was the first manufacturer with a women’s dealer development program. With women influencing 85 percent of all purchase decisions, “why would you not” have such a program, asks Briggs.
WRN works with 350 community colleges and universities in North America and GM encourages dealers to look to local colleges to recruit more women.
Women now make up 5.5 percent of GM’s dealership managers, up from 2.5 percent in 2001.
Investing in women as employees “will pay huge dividends,” says Briggs
For example, besides making female customer feel more welcome, having more women employees benefits dealers through lower employee turnover, something all dealers seek.
GM has training videos on marketing to women. Besides having more women working in the dealership, another way to make women feel welcome is to not waste their time, says Briggs.
“Whoever walks through that door is golden,” she says. “You need to give them an above average retail experience.”
