2:16 am, April 5, 2011
DEALERS can reconnect with past customers and potential purchasers with a brand new sales scheme.
Douglas Stafford’s own highly-trained team of automotive customer service advisors contact customers on a dealership’s behalf and bring them back into the showroom creating extra sales opportunities.
Guy Penfold, Renault Nissan brand manager at Crawley Down Group, Copthorne, West Sussex, has seen the benefits of the scheme.
‘In the first two weeks that we were up and running with Douglas Stafford their team got us 20 appointments in our diary,’ said Penfold. ’14 of those customers came in for their appointments and of those we sold five cars and we bought two for part exchange. The scheme is working really well for us and it has more than paid for itself.
‘Contacting customers by phone requires an entirely different skillset from selling cars face-to-face. My team are car sales advisors – they want to deal face to face with people. That’s what they are strong at.
‘I’m sure there are a lot of people in the industry who would disagree with me – they would say: ‘No, you should get your salesmen to do it.’ And in fairness we were, but we weren’t getting anything like as effective results as Douglas Stafford are achieving.
‘Douglas Stafford’s telephone contact centre staff are specialists at what they do – and they are very professional in the way they do it. It is like having an extension to our business – they are working on our behalf.
‘I get a lot of people coming to see me with marketing ideas and web solutions but I’ve never had something like this – it really has delivered in getting customers to come into my showroom in difficult and demanding economic times and that’s all that I can ask.
‘We had a big sales target in March and I don’t think I would have got there without them. It’s certainly working very well. If you need more showroom traffic then I couldn’t recommend Douglas Stafford highly enough.’
Douglas Stafford’s contact centre manager, Madelaine Cook, said: ‘The Showroom Appointment Initiative is delivering great results for our clients who are benefiting from our ability to bring past customers back into their showrooms and a large proportion of those customers are buying new cars.
‘Dealerships have huge untapped potential in the volume of data that represents their past customers and what we at Douglas Stafford do is help them unlock that potential – and the results are proving to be extremely positive.’
For further details go to www.douglasstafford.com
