When a stay-at-home order from the state of Delaware forced customers out of Audi Wilmington’s showroom in March, General Manager Thomas Mihok decided to make the most of the quiet dealership.
“We need to get caught up,” Mihok told Automotive News, recalling his thoughts during those early days of the coronavirus crisis. If “people are sitting on their phones, people aren’t going to go back to work for months, if we’re going to be here working, we might as well make everything look pretty and have the best website out there.”
So on a portable easel pad in his office, Mihok wrote, “COVID Catch-Up.” He looked at it every day, creating a list of tasks around the dealership that employees could tackle during the downtime.
The list consisted of deep cleaning, organizing, photographing the store, uploading new- and used-vehicle inventory information to the dealership’s website, rewriting templates to use in the business development center and training employees in customer service.
Then employees and dealership managers worked as a team to check off the tasks.
“With all of this time to kill, let’s do some housekeeping,” Mihok said.
Sam Brandes, the dealership’s used-vehicle manager, said one key component of the COVID Catch-Up effort was training employees to be multifaceted.
“One thing we’ve all adapted to is doing multiple jobs,” Brandes said.
Managers are learning how to do finance, salespeople are learning how to handle finance paperwork on their deals, and employees are jumping in to clean vehicles and act as service valets, he said.
When training employees, Mihok asked himself, “How do you provide information to a customer without offending them?”
His idea was to think like a customer. Mihok secretly shopped the dealership website to experience the online chats and digital retailing process from the other side of the transaction.
“In our industry, we do a horrible job of looking at ourselves from the consumer point of view,” he said. “You have to stop and look at your website and see what consumers are seeing.”
With what he learned, Mihok aimed to make the digital experience for customers as easy as possible. He coached employees to treat every customer with warmth, as if they were family members rather than just a person buying a car. He also changed the BDC’s automated templates and simplified them, going from 100 templates to 16.
“We really trained on how to handle customers nowadays,” Mihok said.
When 40 vehicles were delivered to the dealership during the slow period, it was important not to fall behind on new-car photos and inventory uploads to the website. Managers had images taken and uploaded within a week and a half of delivery, faster than they would have been able to before the initiative.
Managers also came up with a strategy to stay caught up even after business picked back up — go into each day with a game plan.
“Being organized allows us to now focus on the customer to make sure every single person gets the attention they deserve,” Brandes said.
It is also important that employees spend their time wisely, he said. For example, sales reps should consider where leads are coming from when they decide which ones to aggressively chase. If the customer inquiry is from five states away, it probably doesn’t warrant the same level of follow-up as a query coming from the local market.
Audi Wilmington’s catch-up efforts have helped make the workday more efficient, allowing more time to focus on the customer experience and adding flexibility for employees, Mihok said.
The dealership, which sold 498 new and 383 used vehicles in 2019, has been able to let employees come in late or leave early because the day’s work is completed sooner.
Brandes said, “The work force flexibility has definitely improved the work morale.”