In the midst of 2020’s crazy selling season, the marine industry witnessed a direct and inverse relationship between sales growth and dealership customer satisfaction scores. During the third quarter, sales-related CSI fell even further, hampered mostly by low scores for sales person follow-up.
While overall Sales CSI scores dipped by just a half of a percentage point, the impact of an overwhelming sales season can now be felt in the service department, where CSI scores on the question, “Was the work done to your satisfaction?” dropped more than 2 full percentage points during the third quarter. Typically, service CSI numbers begin to rebound in September, according to Customer Service Intelligence, Inc., who fields the surveys, but that did not happen this year, as overall service department CSI dropped by nearly 3 full percentage points compared to the previous quarter.
Dealers took the biggest hit, however, in their Net Promoter Scores, a measurement of customer loyalty, in both sales and service. Net Promoter Scores represent the percentage of customers rating their likelihood to recommend a company, product or a service, to a friend or colleague on a scale of 0-10. The formal score is calculated by subtracting the number of Detractors, or customers rating the company at a 6 or below, from the Promoters, who rate a dealer as 9 or 10. Any positive NPS scores means a company has more Promoters than Detractors, and typically anything at 70 or above is considered “world class.”
While Net Promoter Scores for dealership service departments have scored a 77.2 on a
12-month average, the monthly scores have remained, for the most part, on downward
trajectory since April of 2020.
Dealer service Net Promoter Scores fell below that 70-percent threshold for the first time in 2020 this past quarter, suggesting that the number of Detractors is on the rise. A third-quarter dip appears to be the norm for our industry, but we should not sit back and accept this.
The stats show, year after year, that during busy season, Net Promoter Scores drop in both sales and service. These scores don’t necessarily reflect our current situation, however, and although they are scores from previous customers, they also don’t reflect our past. This is a measurement of loyalty — of whether or not the customer will recommend that dealer to someone else — and so the decline in Promoters means future business is at risk.
“It means that dealers are not earning the respect of the customer to the point where the customer is willing to put their reputation on the line and recommend that dealer,” explains Becky Thompson, president of CSI, Inc. “Dealers need to realize that their customer base has choices out there on where to get their service work done. It’s easy to defect if the customer is not enjoying their experience with you – there are dealers all over.”
For manufacturers, the news is equally as bad, if not worse, because when that customer defects from a dealer, that’s oftentimes the brand’s one shot at capturing a customer in that market.
The reality is that service NPS fell from 84.6 in the second quarter to 69.6 in the third quarter, and on the sales side, NPS fell from 81.3 to 70.3 over the same period. The Detractors are already defecting.
“Many times, dealers get so caught up in price, product, and people issues, that they forget it really all comes down to one thing – the customer experience,” Thompson notes. “Ultimately, as summer wears on, and particularly during the crazy busy season of covid, dealers’ ability to execute the fundamentals of taking care of their customers — following up after service or a sale, answering emails and so forth — has been compromised.”
Keep in mind, these results are from dealers that are tracking, measuring and managing their business with customer service at the top of their agenda. What would these numbers look like if we sampled 50 dealers who were not?