Improve customer experience and leave your competitors in the dust with speech analysis

What are your dealership priorities for the next 12 months? Without a doubt, ‘strengthening your competitive advantage’ should be close to the top of your list.

Here’s why.

Car buyers are holding onto their vehicles for longer, as the cost of living crisis forces them to re-evaluate their spending.

It means customers are spending longer with a dealership brand (assuming they’re getting a great customer experience and are happy with their vehicle).

But they won’t hesitate to jump ship to your competitors if they feel that customer experience is deteriorating.

That’s why it’s crucial you stay ahead of your competitors by continuously striving to build brand reputation and give your customers a market-leading dealership experience.

More easily said than done, I know.

In fact, there may even be some things you’re doing that could be harming your dealership’s competitive advantage.

Luckily, there’s a marketing analytics tool that many dealerships are turning to for help in building up their brand salience.

An easy way to boost your competitive advantage

When it comes to gaining an advantage over your competitors, there’s one powerful tool that makes a big difference.

It’s called speech analytics and it brings a host of easy-to-access benefits when it comes to driving up your dealership competitive advantage.

Speech analytics brings a host of easy-to-access benefits when it comes to driving up your dealership competitive advantage.

Here’s how.

The big business benefits of speech analytics for car dealerships

Customer insight

Speech analytics is a fantastic tool to help you understand what your dealership customers are looking for. It also highlights the concerns and worries they may have about buying a car or booking a service with you.

Once you have a greater understanding of the needs and interests of your customers, you can make targeted improvements to your services and the way you market them.

Speech analytics functions as a sentiment analysis tool for dealerships, too. It can help you understand the bigger picture of how many customers and prospects are satisfied or dissatisfied with the dealership experience. In turn, this allows your business to take actions that drive improved levels of customer satisfaction, retention and loyalty.

What’s more, speech analytics tools can help dealers to map customer buying journeys and discover the factors that influence car buyers when it comes to brand loyalty. This means dealers can predict future needs, which can further boost sales and streamline operations.

For example, you’ll better understand the reasons why customers call your dealership – whether it’s to make an enquiry about buying a new car, book a service or something else.

The data that’s gathered can then be centralised and used to help the entire dealer group streamline and improve customer experience and sales performance.

Customer experience

Customer experience is everything in today’s always-on, digital-first world. And it’s becoming a crucial factor in driving retention and loyalty for dealerships.

Speech analytics, when used alongside call recording tools, enables dealerships to assess the success and performance rates of calls. With these insights, you can ensure the best customer experience is being delivered at all times.

Monitoring your team with call recording tools alongside insight gathered on customers through speech analytics, can help your business in multiple ways, including:

• Helping you understand what process and customer experiences are preferred by your prospects
• Testing out new tactics and approaches for meeting customer needs
• Incentivising your team to deliver the best customer experience
• Training your team and driving a culture of constant improvement and learning
• Understanding where customer concerns arise and what they might be

For example, you may see a common trend of enquiries that ask about different electric vehicle specifications. You may find that your team struggles to give satisfactory responses to these questions. If the enquiries are frequent enough, it may trigger you to create some useful resources about electric vehicles which you can place on your website.

That way, your prospective customers can find the answers they need much earlier in their buying journey, and your team can spend less time discussing the issue during phone calls.

With speech analytics and performance monitoring, team leaders also have the data they need to make improvements to call handling times while helping their team to exceed customer expectations.

Identifying new business opportunities

By using speech analytics, dealers can identify the behavioural patterns that drive higher sales volumes. This information can then be used to ensure that customers are presented with the right vehicle or sales offer at the right time.

Speech analytics can help dealerships perfect their marketing messages, increase customer loyalty, and boost conversion rates.

When it comes to dealership marketing campaign performance, this can drive greater support and trust from your superiors. Ultimately, when reliable data from speech analytics can be used to prove campaign ROI, trust in the marketing department is strengthened.

Speech analytics also helps dealerships spot competitive challenges or opportunities.

Speech analytics also helps car dealerships spot competitive challenges or opportunities.

For example, you might notice there are particular words or phrases that indicate a poor customer experience and that customers are beginning to jump ship to a competitor.

Equally, you may see that many customers ask about a particular feature or service, indicating the customer may be a good candidate for a higher value vehicle or service offering.

Having this insight helps you know when you need to consider making improvements to the customer experience. It also helps to spot opportunities to convert one-off customers to repeat business, or to drive up-sell and cross-sell conversions.

Ultimately, speech analytics helps drive the biggest business opportunity of all: a competitive advantage. First-party data, such as the data you can gather from your phone calls, helps you stay several steps ahead of your competitors when understanding customer needs, wants, and desires.

Cutting wasted spend

For many dealerships, speech analytics is an investment that saves them a significant amount of money in the long run.

At Mediahawk, our car dealer clients often tell us that speech analytics helps them save money in the following ways:

• Knowing the common reasons why customers call, allowing call centre teams to proactively troubleshoot customer concerns and questions in advance – saving precious time and resources
• Improving decision-making, to turn guesswork into data-backed strategies and reduce wasted spending for marketing campaigns
• Better targeting campaigns for customer need, delivering prospects the right message at the right time
• Reducing pressure for their teams by streamlining workflows, cutting manual tasks and providing time-saving ways to complete campaign analysis
• Driving business growth to new heights, while allowing dealers to scale their marketing analytics without bringing in additional team support

Turn conversations into insights

Speech analytics allows you to take raw phone call data and draw out critical insights that help you save time, money and a huge amount of effort.

It helps you improve productivity, boost customer experience and drive up efficiency – all while maximising ROI and cutting wasted budget.

For today’s dealerships, it really is a win-win, and a must-have tool for any business looking to stay ahead of the competition with valuable customer insight.