All this talk about the customer experience feels great. We can all nod, smile and agree that the steps we’ve shared over the last few weeks are great tactics for delivering for our customers. But how do you pull it all together in a customer experience strategy?
This is exactly where MRAATraining.com comes into play. MRAATraining.com is an online educational portal where you and your team can access well over 100 courses on just about every topic in marine dealership management, including, of course, the customer experience. It’s a good time to note here that some of the courses I outline below are FREE for anyone to access, while others can be accessed at no charge if you are an MRAA Silver Member or Gold Member. If you are not a Silver or Gold member, you can purchase courses a la carte.
The cornerstones of our customer experience content include two courses by renowned expert Theresa Syer: Make Customer Service Your Competitive Advantage and a workshop called Supercharge Your Customer Experience. These courses will help you really think about how to focus you energies on delivering a powerful, rewarding customer experience. They are great for your team to watch together and to inspire the team to build customer-focused steps into all of your processes.
Make Customer Service Your Competitive Advantage promises to deliver a clear understanding the difference between good service and experiential service, fresh insights and techniques to provide a more emotional approach to customer engagement, and tips on how to make your customers feel valued and appreciated. In Supercharge Your Customer Experience, which was recorded at the 2019 Dealer Week, you will learn how to improve further upon the customer experience, with insights on defining the customers’ emotional motivators (what drives them to buy), identifying key emotional drivers that can shift conversations in your direction, and understanding the consistent actions required to elicit a positive emotional response from your customers. Any strategy on customer experience should start with these courses as the foundation.
Any great customer experience must begin in the sales process. MRAA’s course Buyer Motivation: The Key to Building Value offers incredible sales insights, but most importantly it has been designed to help dealers respond to changes in customer behavior and ultimately close more deals. It teaches sales team members how to customize sales presentations to buying motivation and will help any dealership drive more business at a higher profit while increasing customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. This course is free for anyone to take at MRAATraining.com and is made available by MRAA’s Dealership Certification Program.
Another set of free courses that will help you set the tone for a world-class customer experience is MRAA’s Grow Your Business With First-Time Boat Buyers three-part series. There’s no need to even login or visit a different website with these courses, and these courses will help you understand and guide first-time boat shoppers and sell to first-time buyer motivations, while providing you with a bunch of tools that will help you convert first-time shoppers into buyers.
While those courses offer great foundational concepts to build a customer experience strategy around, others found at MRAATraining.com can help you create solid tactics for enhancing that strategy:
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Service CSI & Upselling: Not an Either/Or Proposition, by Valerie Ziebron, can help you build long-term customer loyalty and dealership profitability one interaction at a time.
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CSI: Outside the Box, by Steve Pizzolato (formerly of Avala Marketing, which was acquired by Rollick), will provide insights into consumer satisfaction during the consideration phase, the initial purchase phase and the post-purchase phase.
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MRAA also published a Guide to Defining The Customer Experience with Pizzolato and his team, which provides a deeper understanding of the basics of delivering a more rewarding customer experience.
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You can learn more about first-time boat buyers through research conducted and shared by Discover Boating.
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Valerie Ziebron offers a great course on how to Turn Upset Customers Into Loyal Ones, which shares positive conflict resolution techniques that you can use to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty.
At the MRAA, we seek to provide resources that you and your dealership need to help you make decisions and run your business with confidence. We know the challenges you face in adjusting your business to meet changing customer demands. That’s why we create powerful resources like those above, but please know that’s not all we have to offer you.
The MRAA runs the marine industry’s only program focused on helping dealers deliver a world-class customer experience: Dealership Certification. Not only can our expert consultants help you put the processes in place to ensure a great customer experience, but the continuing education that is built exclusively for Certified Dealers helps you and your team stay up to speed on the latest methods for developing a competitive advantage through the customer experience. These include two in-depth courses by Theresa Syer on building a customer experience strategy; a course titled Take Your Dealership From Good to Great with CRM, by Sam Dantzler; Align Your Dealership with Today’s Customer, with MRAA’s Liz Walz; and more. These courses are packed with great insights, downloadable resources and dealer discussions.
If you’re not ready to get Certified just yet, each year, MRAA’s Dealer Week conference and expo provides the latest insights, trends and strategies your business needs to thrive in any market conditions. This year, with all of the chaos in the marketplace and the uncertainty that plagued the economy, you can’t afford to miss Dealer Week. As the industry’s only dealer-focused event, it’s your one opportunity to access the leading experts, the top industry partners and like-minded dealers who are all vested in your success.
Finally, if there’s a resource you need or are looking for, please reach out and let us know. If we don’t have it for you already, we’ll help you find it.