Case Study: TEXT2DRIVE Dealership Texting Software Drives Additional Sales and Customer Trust
10% of service dept. customers originated from text message.
12% increase in customer pay when using video in digital MPI’s.
80% adoption rate by service team in using video.
Nearly 10% of the customers who visited Leith Autopark Honda’s service department in the first half originated from a text message. That’s more than 3,000 repair orders the Cary, N.C.-based dealership opened from TEXT2DRIVE’s automated safety recall alerts, service reminders, and declined repair notifications.
Service Director Kevin Mills says the latter serves as a great backup tool for his advisors. “I like how TEXT2DRIVE works in the background on those lost sales. We pick up a lot of sales that way,” he says, adding this about the platform’s safety recall notices: “I call them free money. We typically don’t do them past April or May because we get so busy from August to June. “I recommend it to all our stores. We’ll send out those recall texts on Tuesday morning. By the afternoon, we’re getting calls or text responses.”
![](https://i0.wp.com/text2drive.com/wp-content/uploads/Screen-Shot-2022-10-05-at-9.56.39-AM.png?fit=994%2C663&ssl=1")
Driving the Call Center
Mills says Leith Automotive Group always believed in the power of texting. However, it wasn’t until carriers moved to unlimited text did the dealer group get serious about finding the right solution. After dabbling with the add-on texting tool its DMS provider offers — tools Mills describes as cumbersome — Leith discovered TEXT2DRIVE in 2019.Mills says the platform checked off one of his biggest needs. “TEXT2DRIVE is probably one of the easiest solutions to use. It’s like an Apple phone; you can hand it to anyone, and it’s easy,” he says. “The text templates the platform comes loaded with make it quick for my team. It’s convenient, and it just works the way we need it to work.” By “we,” Mills means his service team and the dealership’s Client Care Center, where some of the customer responses from TEXT2DRIVE’s automated service reminders, safety recall alerts, and declined services notifications are routed. “They do a phenomenal job on those leads,” Mills says of the Client Care Center. “They book all my appointments and communicate back and forth with my advisors through TEXT2DRIVE’s Group Chat feature, which is really cool. If they have a question, they can shoot it right to the group.”
Fast Customer Replies
TEXT2DRIVE has had a significant impact on the dealership’s success rate when it comes to multipoint inspections. Mills estimates a 12% increase in customer pay when his technicians include video in a customer’s texted MPI. Nearly 80% of Mill’s technicians upload videos as part of their inspections, which translates to an 82% lift in total pay during the first half of 2022 after media is sent.“That’s by choice,” Mills says. “We committed ourselves to operate by our company’s tagline: ‘The Name You Can Trust.’ We feel video builds trust and value. In fact, I like to sit in the customer lounge, and I’ll see customers watch our videos two or three times. It’s not because they don’t understand them; they think they’re cool. That’s touching customers on a personal level. “That’s why it’s one of my favorite things about TEXT2DRIVE,” Mills adds. “And we give customers roughly 20 minutes to respond to our MPI text before we call. It took us about a year, but we no longer have to make those calls today. Our customers are pretty much conditioned to respond to our texts.”
