All Present and Accountability for All

The holidays are ending, and as the New Year begins, it will be good to be back at full force. One clear-cut mission: Hit the ground running!

New Year, New Challenges

2025 has the potential to start off with a much different tenor as the country adjusts to new leadership and is anticipating answers for issues like inflation, just as our industry is for a clearer EV picture. However, it all rolls out, no question that everyone on your team needs to see the urgency and necessity of high-level performance from sales to service to F&I to the lot porters. The word is accountability, and it is not optional.

Lessons from the Customer

Among the year-end reviews for our business, Widewail’s 2024 Voice of the Customer Report should be required reading. Utilizing AI over the past two years, customer input in 8.1M Google reviews from over 18,000 new US car dealerships provides a benchmark standard for analyzing customers’ sales and service priorities. Some of the findings come as no surprise, but the overwhelming considerations for accountability – your staff’s attitude, product knowledge, and communication skills – are critical to your reputation for customer experience.

Here are a few highlights of this well-detailed report:

• Top 5 Positive Review topics: staff, helpfulness, friendliness, knowledge, and communication.
• Top 5 Negative Review topics: communication, staff, car maintenance/repair, wait times, management.
• Customer satisfaction with dealership staff dropped in 2024. While positive mentions are up, negativity was up even more at 19.6%. Staff received the highest number of mentions.
• In this era of nearly instantaneous contact, “Communication” was the #1 topic in negative reviews. Compared to 2023, negative mentions increased by over 6%.
• In evaluating the customer experience sales versus service, negative was up over 8% in sales, with 2.9% negative in service.
• Financing focus! Negative comments were up over 31% YOY in negative reviews that also mentioned staff.

It is interesting that what can be called the “attributes of attitude” – helpfulness, friendliness, knowledge, and communication – earned the most 2024 positive comments. Ironically, each of these was mentioned years ago along with being on time, work ethic, effort, energy, passion, being coachable, and being prepared in a list titled “10 Things That Require Zero Energy.” Contrary to the list’s title, all of these attributes require a great deal of energy, with continuous effort.

Accountability Equals Success

Success in 2025 depends every day on all who are present at your dealership and the accountability of all they do for each customer.

Of that, you can be positive!