You know follow-up is that last, important step in your sales process, but the July holidays have just passed, and you’re still busy and wondering how you could possibly find the time to follow-up yourself or hire someone else to do the job.

 

If you’re feeling overwhelmed by the need to follow-up with your ne w boat buyers, and you’re unable to hire someone to lead the effort for you internally, outsourcing these services is a way to get a follow-up program started quickly, as well as to get access to detailed reports on how your dealership is performing.

 

In a perfect world, we could do everything for our business ourselves, but that’s not always how things work. We all contract with vendors for a variety of things, from shipping to lawn care and from cleaning to human resources. Follow-up could also be contracted out.

 

Hiring a company to complete phone campaigns for you takes the work off your plate and offers the outreach that your customers need.

 

To learn more about outsourcing follow-up calls, we reached out to MRAA partner member CSI Inc., which offers dealers calls after delivery, alerts on issues, WOW reports on praise for your staff and monthly reports that track your team’s performance.

 

Becky Thompson, president of CSI, Inc., said that by following up and addressing issues, dealers can create lifelong customers.

 

“Everyone knows that happy customers make lifelong customers, and lifelong customers will put a nice profit on anyone’s bottom line,” Thompson said. “We all know it’s more costly to gain new customers, so why not invest to make sure every customer is so impressed with the care and concern they are receiving, that they wouldn’t go anywhere else for service and future sales?”

 

Follow-up is recommended with returning customers, service customers, and of course, first-time boat buyers.

 

“First time boat buyers will always have questions, and they need to feel confident they can come to their dealer for answers,” Thompson explained. “Build that trust, share their excitement, quality control check, and you will build lifelong customers.”

 

Following up with customers and gaining meaningful feedback has a variety of benefits, Thompson said. Those include:

 

• Fixing problems quickly, thereby saving customers with the customer intelligence obtained during the follow-up call. End result: Added profit to your bottom line!
• Building a stronger relationship with customers because the call clearly sends the customer a signal that the dealer really cares about their experience.
• Praising and recognizing staff for a job well done.
• Identifying broken processes, so they can be corrected, saving issues with the next customer.
• Praising and recognizing staff for a job well done.
• Identifying broken processes, so they can be corrected, saving issues with the next customer.
• Identifying broken staff processes, so retraining can occur.
• Tracking employees’ performance, enabling recognition for the employees who are providing exceptional service.
• Learning what your Net Promoter Score is.
• Learning what your Customer Satisfaction Index rating is.
• Identifying which marketing avenues are driving customers to the dealership.
• Revealing needed improvements that might otherwise be invisible. These are golden nuggets!

 

Follow-up is so crucial to building up your customer base with loyal, raving fans, and their referrals. So, finding a system that works for you is important. Outsourcing just might be that route, if you’re looking for an efficient program that takes the hard work off your hands.