Owners are keeping their vehicles longer than ever according to a recent study. That means new car sales will be a smaller and smaller portion of a dealership’s business. Dealerships must work harder than ever to win customer’s trust and their service business, and to keep it.
It seems the auto industry as a whole is doing a somewhat better job of trying to win consumers’ trust than in the past. A recent study by Reputation.com found automotive ranked highest in response time to negative online feedback. Good going! Of course, Reputation.com wants to earn more of your business so that praise came with a caveat – increased diligence in monitoring reputation across all possible forms of digital communication is called for. Still, overall good news.
Dealerships may be good at responding to negative online feedback, but consumers in California don’t trust dealerships with their personal information, it seems. A new law here (I am in Los Angeles) requires a high level of diligence where handling personal information is concerned. Scali Rasmussen this week offers some very useful advice about due diligence before an acquisition regarding this new law.
A dealership may have a good reputation in the community but still have a lot of areas that can be improved upon. That’s the case with a Ford Lincoln dealership in Washington state that was just acquired by Rich Hartman and Julian Greening. Greening talked with me about what he likes about the dealership and how he is going to return it to its glory days of much higher sales than it is currently experiencing.
And of course we have Transaction News.
Enjoy!
