Putting Customers and Employees First · and vice versa; but, get both right and you’ll find your...

Reynolds and Reynolds

The Power of a Great Payment Experience

Putting Customers and Employees First

Scott Worthington, Director of Product PlanningReynolds and Reynolds

800.767.7879 | [email protected] | www.reyrey.com

1

Customer Relationship Management for Dealerships Is No Mickey Mouse Application800.767.7879 | [email protected] | www.reyrey.com

It is almost universally accepted that an exceptional customer experience is critical for your dealership’s sustained success and profitability.

But, have you ever stopped to consider the employee experience? Or, more important, have you considered how your employees’ experiences directly affect your customers?

The fact is, a lack of process efficiency in the dealership – meaning your employees’ jobs are harder, more tedious, or more repetitive than they might otherwise be with better practices and solutions in place – has a trickle-down effect. If the employee experience within your store is a negative one, how could that possibly translate to a positive experience for your customers?

The short answer is, it doesn’t.

Fortunately, there are nearly infinite process improvements and tools available to help dealers create efficiencies and provide a great customer experience. In this whitepaper, I’ll focus on improvements and tools designed around the payment experience.

Eliminate the WaitConsider how the process of paying itself is intrinsic to how smooth – or not smooth – a retail experience is perceived to be. Imagine the following scenario: A customer purchases a car from you and has a great experience, and you think you’ve won them over. But, what if they agree to buy new wiper blades at their second service visit, and wait in line forever to pay?

Chances are, you’ve lost them to the shop down the street because their perception is that your dealership is slow and they’d rather take their business elsewhere. 70 percent of retailers report consumers will wait five minutes or less to pay before abandoning a purchase and leaving the store.1 Five minutes.

Here are a few ways you can reduce the wait and provide a great payment experience across the dealership:

• In the F&I office, accept credit card payments without having to leave the customer to find a cashier or payment terminal. Abandoning a customer at the F&I desk to second-guess their purchase while your F&I manager is walking around the dealership with their credit card isn’t a great experience. In fact, any time a credit card leaves a customer’s view it has a lasting negative impact. Instead, implement a tool that allows your F&I manager to accept payment at their desk, within your dealership management system (DMS). This capability improves the employee experience as well, making their jobs easier and faster while reducing the opportunity for keystroke errors.

Putting Customers and Employees First: The Power of a Great Payment Experience

If the employee experience within your store is a negative one, how could that possibly translate to a positive experience for your customers?

70 percent of retailers report consumers will wait five minutes or less to pay before abandoning a purchase and leaving the store.

2


• In your parts department, set up a payment process for wholesale customers before they even arrive. Think of the online food ordering experience: When you arrive to pick up your food, you’ve already reviewed the order and paid. You simply grab your food and go. This is considered standard process now, to the extent that the CEO of Chipotle said, “Digital ordering is more appealing to our customers and more efficient for our restaurants.”2 Why should your dealership be any different? If you know a parts wholesale customer will be coming in, email his invoice ahead of time so he can review, pay, grab his parts, and go. Better yet, save his card information so he doesn’t have to input it next time.

• In service, use tablets in your drive. Tablets increase efficiency and improve the customer experience by allowing advisors to stay with the customer throughout the checkout process. Additionally, if your advisors use Bluetooth®-enabled tablets, customers can pay without ever having to leave their cars.

• Create a Fast Lane Checkout. Once you have customers who have started paying online for their service or parts, you can implement a fast lane checkout. Many dealerships see such a decrease in wait times that they can reposition cashiers for other job duties. Consider placing one of your cashiers at a separate fast lane checkout kiosk for customers who have already paid. Make the experience as “VIP” as possible. Similar to other VIP lines, like TSA pre-check, customers who go through the fast lane checkout will appreciate the convenience and efficiency. Customers who don’t will want to know how they can get into the fast lane checkout and out of the line they’re in.

ConvenienceIt’s no secret that people like to have a variety of options available to them, and the automotive retail payment experience is no different. Customers want different payment options, whether in the form of tap-to-pay technologies, mobile wallets, online pay via email, or text-to-pay.

Tap-to-pay refers to a customer using a tap-to-pay-enabled card, “tapping” it on a payment terminal located in your dealership. It’s faster than swiping and just as secure as inserting the card into the terminal.

With mobile wallets, a customer can store their credit card information and make a payment on their phone without having to get their card out of their wallet – they need only to hold their phone over the payment terminal for payment to be accepted.

Many dealerships see such a decrease in wait times that they can reposition cashiers for other job duties.

Customers want different payment options, whether in the form of tap-to-pay technologies, mobile wallets, online pay via email, or text-to-pay.

3


Mobile wallets are especially becoming a preferred payment option, as shown in the below graph illustrating the popularity of mobile payments from 2018 to projected growth in 2022.4 Will your dealership be optimized for those 74.9 million people in the future? eMarketer also found that the transaction value will increase from $62.29 billion in 2018 to $160.79 billion in 2022.5

If you choose to email invoices to customers, you’ll have a better success rate if you incorporate two critical features: personalization and customization.

Personalization is one of the most significant reasons customers give a business their loyalty. By definition, personalization appeals to everyone. Consider what The Coca-Cola Company did when making cans and bottles with different names on them. With arguably one of the most successful marketing campaigns in history, the brand increased sales and created nearly endless successive advertising opportunities.

The same opportunity exists for your dealership. Instead of customers giving your service advisor a fake email address to avoid marketing efforts, they are more inclined to provide their actual email if you’re sending them their invoice ahead of time. Your dealership

The popularity of mobile payments is projected to grow from 55 million to 74.9 million by 2022.

Personalization is one of the most significant reasons customers give a business their loyalty.

US Proximity Mobile Payment Users and Penetration, 2018-2022millions, % change and % of smartphone users

Proximity mobile payment users% change % of smartphone users

25.3%

55.0

61.667.2

71.774.9

14.5%

27.4%

12.0%

29.3% 30.8%

6.7%9.0%

31.8%

4.5%

Note: ages 14+; mobile phone users who have made at least one proximity transactions made by using mobile devices as a paayment method; excludes transactions made via tabletSource: eMarketer, May 2018

4


should be sending invoices that are personalized to the customer. By simply adding their name and vehicle, you’re increasing the feeling that your dealership knows the customer – they aren’t just any other customer to you. One dealership we work with increased their valid email addresses from 36.2% to 54.9% in just six months.

The fact is, consumers now equate personalization to a company’s reputation. 57 percent are willing to provide their personal information in return for tailored offers and discounts, and 52 percent said they’re willing to receive product recommendations if they’re personalized.5

Beyond personalization, branding the emails your dealership sends to customers is also important. Emails customized with your dealership logos leave more of a lasting impression than a generic email. Additionally, customized emails tend to make it through spam filters in email providers, meaning more of your emails get read. Customizing your emails should be easy as well – set it up once and it’s conveniently ready for all customer emails.

Finally, every step your dealership takes should have one overarching goal in mind: convenience. Indeed, convenience for customers doesn’t matter if it isn’t efficient for your employees, and vice versa; but, get both right and you’ll find your employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction index (CSI) scores skyrocketing.

Here are two key ways you can create both with refinements to payment processes:

• Online Vehicle Deposits: People now buy everything online, from shoes to mattresses to groceries to clothes. Why not a car? It’s widely acknowledged across the industry that the “next big thing” in automotive retail is allowing customers to purchase a vehicle online. The first step is allowing them to put down a deposit online. Online vehicle deposits are crucial to your dealership because it’s a different process than just holding a vehicle for a customer for a couple of reasons:

– If you do hold a vehicle for a customer without a down payment, what happens when that customer doesn’t come in? You missed the opportunity to sell that car to someone else.

– What if you tell a customer you’ll keep a vehicle for them but then can’t find it or worse, it’s already been sold? You’ve lost a customer forever.

Online deposits that are tied to your DMS will reserve the vehicle for a customer, and since they’ve put money down on the car, they’re invested and more likely to actually come in and purchase the vehicle.

The fact is, consumers now equate personalization to a company’s reputation.

People now buy everything online, from shoes to mattresses to groceries to clothes.

5


• If you’re leveraging the right tools in F&I, parts, and service, the accounting office has less cleanup. For example, if your payment solution isn’t part of your DMS, then you’re using manual entry to accept payments and increasing the likelihood for errors. The accounting office has to go through those errors and, if necessary, call the customer to charge them the correct amount. Does that sound like a great experience? It’s not a fun job either. No one wants to be the employee to hassle the customer for more money. Dealerships lose up to $200-$300 per month because they’d rather just write off those amounts. Instead, dealerships should automate as much data entry as possible.3 A solution built as part of your DMS reduces manual entries, which reduces errors so your office has more time to focus on more profitable work.

Security Once customers start paying online, they may have questions about the security of payments at your dealership. This isn’t just an online issue, but extends to payments made dealership-wide.

Obviously by now your dealership is Europay, Mastercard, and Visa (EMV) compliant, but there are other ways to ensure payment security throughout the dealership:

• Use point-to-point encryption for credit card payments at a terminal. The encryption takes the card information, turns it into a code, and doesn’t crack the code until the payment is complete.

• Store credit card information securely via tokens. Whereas point-to-point encryption happens at the time of payment, tokenization happens when the payment details are stored, replacing the card data with token information. In the unlikely event a hacker gets into the token vault, the information is useless to them because there isn’t card information linked to each token.

• Make sure you’re maintaining payment security through the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). These standards are critical for all businesses that accept credit cards. Some of the standards, such as using a firewall to protect data and implementing a process to restrict payment data, might seem like common sense, but the process for being PCI compliant can be tedious and time-consuming. It’s a good idea to be as thorough as possible and consider a third party to help guarantee compliance.

The Power of a Great Payment ExperienceWhether you’re focusing on creating new process efficiencies for your employees or improving CSI scores, there’s no doubt that investing in your payment experience dealership-wide transforms your dealership’s reputation and customer perception.

Dealerships lose up to $200-$300 per month because they’d rather just write off those amounts.

…investing in your payment experience dealership-wide transforms your dealership’s reputation and customer perception.

800.767.7879 | [email protected] | www.reyrey.com© 2019 The Reynolds and Reynolds Company. All rights reserved. 5/19

Taking the time and effort to implement these types of changes requires a discipline that puts customers first, which is a service approach that’ll be evident to customers when they come to your store.

By moving to the forefront of payment technology, you can make your customer and employee experience outstanding– and be the dealership customers want to come back to.

Visit www.reyrey.com/whitepapers to read more abouthow the automotive industry is changing.

1 https://web.timetrade.com/files/content_resource/TT_Retail-Exec-Survey-Brief.pdf 2 https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/05/30/chipotle-is-betting-on-digital.aspx3 https://www.vansystems.com/2017/05/04/how-to-avoid-data-entry-mistakes/ 4 https://www.emarketer.com/content/mobile-proximity-and-peer-to-peer-payments-2018 5 https://www.pncdigital.com/personalization-in-all-aspects-of-marketing/

Scott Worthington is director of Product Planning at Reynolds and Reynolds. With more than 27 years of automotive industry experience, Scott leads the team responsible for product strategy for the company’s ERA® dealership management system platform. He also manages product strategy for Reynolds eWorkflow™, DMS reporting tools and analytics, and a number of other product areas.

Putting Customers and Employees First · and vice versa; but, get both right and you’ll find your...

Documents

Transcript of Putting Customers and Employees First · and vice versa; but, get both right and you’ll find your...