“It’s an exciting time to throw the balls up in the air and reassess the way we do things and how we can have far more interaction across the departments of the business.
“Ultimately that will help improve the service to our customers and improve retention which gives us a very resilient business for the future.
“We’re not frightened to have a go at things.
"But likewise we’re not frightened to turn around and say we’re not quite as good as we should be when we’ve got things wrong.”
Product geniuses
A customer with a 23-year-old BMW 3 Series which Cotswold looks after for servicing was involved in an accident and his insurance company provided him with a new 1 Series because the accident wasn’t his fault.
He phoned the group to say he didn’t understand how the car worked, confused that “it kept stopping and starting on its own”.
Neale said: “The technology on these new BMWs is light years ahead.
"Traditionally with a sales exec, what would they normally have done?
"They might have said, “Come down, I might have five minutes with you”.
“Or they’ll maybe phone customer services.
"We are now able to say: “Why don’t you come down, we’ll book a slot with a genius for an hour and that genius will talk you through all the controls in the car like a proper handover as if you’d bought a new car.”
And that’s what we’re able to do because the genius had the time and the inclination to want to do it.
“A sales executive wouldn’t have been paid for helping that customer and there potentially would have been no immediate car sale in sight.”
AM Award Winner Excellence in Customer Service – Cotswold BMW
Cotswold BMW Cheltenham improved its customer satisfaction levels after redeveloping the way it deals with customers with a particular focus on aftersales.
The dealership team created a CustomerFirst strategy which provided a consistent approach to customer service.
It refined the customer process and structure; increasing inter-department collaboration and behaviour.
A number of steps were undertaken to track consistency, which included monitoring mystery shop calls and combining that process with personal
development plans for staff.
Cotswold BMW Cheltenham’s solid action plan has seen CSI scores improve year-on-year and sit in the top quartile for sales and aftersales in the BMW UK network, while its Net Promoter Score improved from 69.2% to 81.16% within just five months.
Author:
Tom Seymour
Freelance writer
Freelance writer for AM, Tom Seymour has been a specialist B2B journalist covering the automotive sector for over 14 years. He started his freelance career in 2015 and currently writes for a variety of automotive, business and technology publications.
neilthedeal - 20/05/2013 14:44
Does the management team lead by example and work similar hours as the slaves they employ in sales, lets not forget the most successful Managers/Leaders, have historically come from a sales background, not accounting or operations. More importantly do these so called senior exces have the trained skills to manage this process? I've seen so many unqualified people in management roles in automotive, who haven't got the very basics to become good leaders!!!