Implementing Dynamic Texting to Enhance Customer Support During Busy Seasons
Peak sales season brings a flurry of activity, with customers bustling about your store or visiting your digital storefront. They want to browse your inventory and peruse your website, but eventually just about every serious shopper will need to connect directly with your dealership.
That’s great news for you, as long as you can handle the increased demand for your attention. As your dealership prepares for the busy shopping season, implementing dynamic texting can help you enhance shopper support and give every potential customer the experience they expect.
This blog post will outline the benefits of implementing dynamic texting in time for the next busy season and give your dealership a few best practices and practical advice for implementing and managing texting, including the following topics:
- What is Dynamic Texting?
- The Benefits of Dynamic Texting
- Best Practices for a Dynamic Texting Strategy
- Exceed Your Shoppers’ Expectations
What Is Dynamic Texting?
A dynamic texting tool is a powerful communication tool that allows dealerships to reach their customers quickly and effectively through text, which has become the preferred method of communication for many people.
One of the main purposes of a dynamic texting tool is to improve customer engagement and retention. By sending personalized messages to customers, you can build stronger relationships and keep customers informed about new products, services and promotions. This not only helps to increase customer loyalty but also drives sales and revenue for the dealership.
The Benefits of Dynamic Texting
Aside from giving you the increased capacity to handle the barrage of incoming questions and keep shoppers engaged during your busy sales season, dynamic texting offers many benefits for your dealership and shoppers.
Meeting Customer Expectations
The volume of phone calls is dropping, especially among younger generations. In fact, 75% of millennials admit to avoiding phone calls simply because they are time-consuming. Forty-six percent of consumers seek out businesses that offer alternatives to phone calls.
Dynamic texting gives your shoppers the convenience of reaching your dealership quickly and with minimal time commitment—the way your shoppers prefer to communicate—while still speaking with an actual sales or customer service representative.
Text messages have a 98% open rate, and 45% of consumers respond to marketing text messages.
Streamlined Customer Engagement
One platform to manage it all; dynamic texting equips your dealership to handle queries from multiple channels through a single platform. Whether potential customers are reaching out via text, Facebook Messenger or website lead form submission, these messages are all funneled to your text app.
This omni-channel approach maximizes your reach and ensures no query goes unattended.
Build Trust & Confidence with Shoppers Through Real-time Conversations
When shoppers know they can reach a member of your team quickly and with minimal hassle, you build the foundations of lasting relationships. When you build relationships, you build trust that customers can come to your dealership with any need they have, be it buying a new unit or simply asking for advice.
Dynamic texting allows you to foster relationships with your shoppers, even before they come to your dealership in person. As you actively listen to shoppers’ requests and respond in helpful and understanding ways, they form a connection with your brand and business. This gives you a leg-up on your competition to bring in new potential customers at a very early stage in the shopping journey.
Automating Repetitive Tasks
Another benefit of using a dynamic texting tool is its ability to automate certain tasks. This can save your dealership time and resources, as you no longer have to manually send out reminders or follow-up messages. Instead, the tool can be programmed to send out automated messages at specific times or intervals, freeing up your team to focus on other important tasks.
Examples include:
- Automated appointment reminders
- Sending review requests after a purchase
- Sending mobile payment links for down payments and remaining balances
- Re-engaging past customers to remind them to book a service
Capture Leads & Facilitate Sales by Guiding Shoppers Through the Buying Process
Dynamic texting is also a great way to give shoppers personalized calls to action at an early stage of the purchase process. If a potential customer is enquiring about a unit or service but isn’t ready to buy, you can give them the next steps to keep leading them toward a purchase, even if it’s just one call to action at a time.
These may include following up with the shopper via text to come in for a test drive, come see a unique feature in person, read an article or blog post on your website about their interests and more. A conversation through text may be your first direct exchange with a shopper and can be your best chance to keep them in your sale funnel by helping them to take the next logical step.
Best Practices for Dynamic Texting
Dynamic texting can give your dealership and your shoppers all of the above benefits, but there are right and wrong ways to implement and manage an effective texting strategy. Follow these best practices to give your shoppers the very best experience and bring in more business for your dealership this busy season.
Promote Your Texting Service
Make sure your prospects and customers know that they can reach your dealership through text. Feature your phone number prominently on your website, email signature and social media profiles with an invitation to send your dealership a text message.
Get Consent to Text Your Customers
If you have a practice of asking your shoppers for their contact information at the purchase stage (and you should), make sure you have their consent to send post-purchase texts. Offer an opt-in process so your customers can agree to receive service reminders and notifications about special promotions and seasonal sales.
Create Automated Responses to FAQs
Even with the convenience of texting, you can be available to your shoppers every hour of the day. Many shoppers are online outside of business hours, which means they may have questions at times that you’re not available to answer. During these times, it’s important to offer responses to frequently asked questions so shoppers can satisfy their query and press on with their purchase journey.
Responses to FAQs can also be beneficial during the busy season, as many shoppers will find what they’re looking for without having to occupy your team’s time. A good FAQ response can also help to establish your dealership as an authority in the industry with answers to all the questions your potential customers have.
Extend Customer Support Hours During the Busy Season
During the busy sales season, shoppers are more likely to have erratic browsing and buying windows—even shopping after normal hours. Even though a good FAQ can give many shoppers the information they need and help to alleviate the burden of being available 24/7, there’s still no replacing real human interaction.
Consider extending your customer support hours during the busy season to accommodate the influx of shoppers coming to your site or contacting your dealership. When a shopper sees that you have a customer service rep available after hours to answer questions, they will see that you’re as serious about your business as they are about their purchase. You begin to build trust with shoppers and score points with more potential customers, giving you an edge against your competition.
Best of all, the flexibility of a texting tool means that you are not glued to the computer, answering these questions on a desktop. You can respond to queries from anywhere – on the road, on the dealership lot or at home.
Promote Special Offers & Discounts During Relevant Interactions
Remember, texting isn’t just a convenience for your potential customers, it’s a tool for your dealership to boost sales and steer your shoppers down the path to purchase. As shoppers chat with your reps, give them incentives to keep doing business with you. Mention special deals and discounts, especially if they’re related to the interests of your shoppers. Introduce related items and the services you offer to pique the interest of your shoppers and increase your chances of upsell opportunities.
Any chance you have to chat with your shoppers is a chance to bring in new business and make new sales. Just be sure to structure your conversation so that it doesn’t feel salesy and shoppers don’t feel pressured to make a purchase. As soon as they feel like the conversation has turned from a convenient forum to ask questions to a pushy way to get them to make a purchase, it will turn them off.
Train Your Team to Create a Consistent, Positive Experience
A text message may be the first chance you have to make a first impression on your shoppers. For your shoppers, it could be the first interaction they have with an actual representative from your dealership. Slow message response times tell your shoppers that you’re not interested in hearing from them or that you’re too busy to bother. Either way, it makes the wrong impression.
While it might not be possible to respond to every text inquiry within seconds, it’s important to train your team to respond quickly and not keep potential customers waiting. A rule of thumb is to respond to queries within 24 hours, but it’s ideal to respond within the hour if you can. If you’re concerned about leaving your shoppers waiting, you may consider setting up an automated message informing the shopper that you’ve received their text and will respond soon.
Create a consistent brand standard for texting etiquette so that your shoppers always have a consistent experience, no matter which team member is communicating with them. Good texting etiquette includes:
- Responding within the expected time frame
- Personalizing the message by addressing the shopper by name
- Keeping messages concise and to the point
- Avoid poor grammar, typos, business jargon or being too informal
- Include specific calls to action
- Be mindful of timing – don’t send texts late at night or early in the morning
Integrate Dynamic Texting with Your CRM System
Today’s consumers aren’t just demanding in terms of wanting quick text response times, they expect you to know practically everything about them—including their interests and their previous conversations and interactions with your dealership. In fact, 76% of consumers expect businesses to understand their exact needs in order to make their experience more personal and more pleasant, according to Forbes.
When you interact with shoppers via texting, don’t let those conversations go unrecorded. Integrate your dynamic texting tool with your customer relationship management (CRM) system, so you can keep every shopping experience seamless, even those that start with a simple question about a unit listing.
You can use a history of your text conversations within your CRM to follow up with potential customers with custom offers. This will provide shoppers with a personalized sales experience when they eventually do come in to visit your dealership.
Monitor Analytics to Measure Text Performance
If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it. This age-old philosophy has never been truer than with modern sales tools and technologies, including texting. As you implement dynamic texting, track important metrics like response times, how many shoppers sent or responded to text messages within the past month, conversation abandonment, wait times, length of conversations and any texts left unanswered on either end.
Capture text messages for future sales purposes and to use as training to help representatives see where they’ve succeeded in helping a satisfied shopper and where they can improve. You may also consider inviting shoppers to take a brief satisfaction survey after interacting with your dealership via text. Surveys can provide helpful feedback and information for training purposes and improve future interactions with shoppers.
Exceed Your Shoppers’ Expectations
When you’re in the thick of the busy season, shoppers are going to be flocking to your store and your digital storefront. Are you ready? Dynamic texting can help you accommodate this influx of questions and consumer interest and give you a chance to enhance their experience and build relationships with shoppers right out of the gate, even before they’ve had a chance to visit your dealership.
By implementing dynamic texting and following a few best practices, you can exceed shopper expectations by giving them the convenient forum they’re looking for and bring in more business this busy season.
If you’re in the marketing for a dynamic texting solution, connect with Dealer Spike today to learn more about our premium texting services.