12:49 pm, April 27, 2022
With the motor trade embracing digital services in a way it never has done before, you might assume the days of personal customer contact are long gone.
That, however, isn’t the case and dealers who turn their backs on dealing with customers directly rather than digitally could potentially lose not just money but reputation, too.
That’s the view of Arran Duffy, managing director of OTT. He’s seen first hand the benefits of skilled customer contact staff liaising with customers on behalf of dealers can have, and explained this in the video at the top of this story.
OTT works with a handful of the largest dealer groups in the UK, along with a number of smaller businesses, and offers a range of professional and reliable contact centre services for inbound and outbound enquiries.
It’s this breadth of experience which allows OTT to work with any dealership of any size and offer services to their exacting requirements.
OTT can help a dealer with all of their customer facing needs – from new and used car leaders, aftersales, customer satisfaction surveys to lost leads and renewing lapsed customers.
‘Car dealer groups can do the vast majority of tasks themselves, but what they tend to struggle with are the repetitive ones.
‘A dealer group will have a database of thousands of customers and will have to contact them day-in, day-out, along with dealing face-to-face with customers.
‘That can be really challenging and this is where we can help out.’
Unlike some customer contact centres which just take a message on behalf of a customer and pass that over to the dealership, OTT can take control of the whole customer experience.
OTT has recently been working hard in the aftersales area and working with dealers on their amber and red deferred work.
‘It’s really taken off rapidly,’ says Duffy, ‘and a lot faster than we anticipated.
‘We have full access to a client’s DMS system and we are able to follow up on a customer who perhaps came into the dealership a year or three months before for an EVHC (Electronic Vehicle Health Check).
‘From that EVHC, the dealership would have made the customer aware of the work that would have been needed and the price. Sometimes it’s very hard for the sales advisor to have that conversation with the customer and sell on the day – that’s where we step in.’
With an aftersales customer, for instance, OTT can make the workshop booking, organise the courtesy car, and deal with the customer should any work be required.
And this is the important part – OTT steps in on behalf of the dealership, providing a consistently high level of service and the customer never thinks they’re speaking with someone other than the dealership.
So, not only does the dealer look good in the customer’s eye, but there’s a cost saving here, too – and for multi-site dealers and groups it’s a large saving.
OTT charges £400 per month, per site, for its customer contact services, with the average dealer seeing a return on investment of between £5,000 and £15,000 per month. That potentially equates to some massive cost savings per year.
Also in the video, Duffy explains:
- Why outsourcing customer contact services is a screwed move
- Why personal communications with customer are more important and ever
- Why the industry is getting back to normal after the pandemic
You can watch the full interview by clicking the video at the top of this story
For more information, visit: ottauto.co.uk or phone 0800 1244377
