Important Message to Auto Dealers: Texting Increases Car Repair Order ROI
Key Take Aways
- A Volvo dealership reports that service advisors save as much as 40 hours a month using the TEXT2DRIVE™ messaging platform to notify customers of service intervals, repairs completion and follow-up in place of leaving a voicemail.
- The response rate for sales and service is 45% for text messaging compared to only 6% for email.
- Sandberg Volvo in Washington State CSI scores improved from 75% to nearly 95% over a 5-month period when using TEXT2DRIVE’s text messaging to confirm customers received follow up communication after repairs were completed.
- The higher the response rate to customer surveys, the better a dealership’s sense of what it’s doing right as well as where it needs to improve.
- The higher the response rate to customer surveys, the better a dealership’s sense of what it’s doing right as well as where it needs to improve.
- Dealers using TEXT2DRIVE™ messaging service reminders reported an average 15.9% ROI on service appointments, with a lower rate of declined services resulting in a 10.8% ROI for repair orders.
Important Message to Auto Dealers: Texting Increases Car Repair Order ROI
Text messaging is a time saver…one Volvo dealership reports that service advisors save as much as 40 hours a month using the TEXT2DRIVE™ messaging platform to notify customers of service intervals, repairs completion and follow-up in place of leaving a voicemail. What’s even better than saving time and money?
Improving your dealership ROI by increasing customer satisfaction through more effective customer communications following service appointments provided through text messaging.
Text messaging is a more effective communication tool because it has a 99% open rate (and 90 percent are opened within three minutes) compared to voice communications. The response rate for sales and service is 45% for text messaging compared to only 6% for email!
An additional advantage of text messaging is that it’s highly interactive—it’s an ideal medium to get almost instant feedback via completion of short surveys. These surveys not only gather important customer intelligence and improve customer satisfaction, they are highly effective tools to improve the ROI of your service department.
Don’t just take our word for it though, here’s what actual users of TEXT2DRIVE™ report.
6 Ways Text Messaging Increases Repair Order ROI
1. Better Follow Up
Upon completion of a service, customers of Sandberg Volvo in Washington State are sent a short four-question survey concerning the condition of the waiting room, the work performed, the condition of the vehicle when it was returned.
Most critically, customers are asked to confirm they received follow up communications after repairs were completed. Typically, this question got the lowest score; with TEXT2DRIVE™ messaging, the score over a five-month period improved from 75% to nearly 95%. That’s compared to a national average response rate of 78%.
2. Fix Problems Before They Become Bigger Problems
Improving follow up with customers has two benefits:
- Customers receive confirmation that you care about the quality of service and are taking an extra step to ensure their satisfaction with their car repair order.
- If customers are not completely satisfied, you can address it quicker and take immediate steps to correct any issues. This not only increases customer satisfaction, but also enables you to act before customers complain online to review sites or to other customers. Needless to say, negative comments aren’t good for business.
3. Know Your Customers Better
The higher the response rate to customer surveys, the better your sense of what you’re doing right as well as where you need to improve. The more you know about how you can make customers happier, the happier they’ll be. And happy customers are returning customers. Not just for repairs, but for big ticket new car purchases.
4. Satisfied Customers Are Returning Customers
An FCA Chrysler dealership chain reports a 5.3-point Year Over Year (YOY) in its Customer Satisfaction Index (CSI) for a dealership in a pilot TEXT2DRIVE™ messaging platform. Dealers with less than one year in the pilot reported a 2.1-point improvement. Dealers that didn’t use TEXT2DRIVE™ messaging comparatively saw only a 0.9-point CSI improvement.
5. Satisfied Customers Improve Service ROI
Dealers using TEXT2DRIVE™ messaging service reminders reported an average 15.9% ROI on service appointments, with a lower rate of declined services resulting in a 10.8% ROI for repair orders. Perhaps most significantly, this FCA Chrysler dealership reported a 1.2% increase in repair orders equating to $26,000.
Warranty work actually declined during the same period. This is significant because TEXT2DRIVE™ helped attract more new customers paying for work that could have been performed elsewhere, as opposed to warranty repairs where customers are obligated to use the dealer.
An additional benefit is that TEXT2DRIVE™ gives dealerships the ability to send repair order invoices via text messaging, which means they can receive payments faster and more conveniently by keeping the customer out of a long line.
6. It’s Easy
You can gain all these benefits without incurring a lot of effort. “Set it and forget it” is a fundamental feature of the TEXT2DRIVE™. A BMW service advisor describes it as “very user friendly and simple to use.”
TEXT2DRIVETM provides a powerful, simple and intuitive software as a service (SaaS) application that improves customer communications and satisfaction, resulting in improved CSI and repair order ROI.
If you’d like to learn more about the correlation between customer satisfaction and increases in repair orders, please check out this article why customer satisfaction is the gateway to an increase in RO revenue.