Who they are
Dilawri Group of Companies has served car buyers in Canada since 1985. It is both a family-owned business and the largest automotive group in Canada, thanks to 67 franchised dealerships located across five provinces. The Dilawri family and more than 3,500 team members offer customers a high quality of customer service and a diverse range of buying options, drawn from 30 automotive brands.
The rationale for customer service via text message
For any business, keeping customers informed is crucial to the maintenance of long-term relationships. Auto dealerships with service departments need to be a support to their customers and remind them of upcoming appointments, inform them of the need for routine maintenance, and ensure that they are satisfied with the dealership's level of care.
In the past, phone calls have been the go-to way that dealerships make this kind of contact. It does serve its purpose and enables the dealership to stay connected to the customer, but voice communication is becoming less popular in the digital age. Now, many customers find voice calls more intrusive than other forms, and dealerships are finding that calling each customer is more time-consuming than it needs to be.
Too many messages, too little time
The service representatives at Dilawri were making two kinds of phone calls. The first were what the dealership calls “productive” calls, in that they have the potential to drive more revenue and increase business. These include calls that remind customers of overdue service, inquire about maintenance tasks that the customer had previously refused, or inform the customer of factory recalls. Such calls are critical to keeping customers involved with the dealership, and agents were not having enough time to complete them.
These agents were also busy with “mundane” communications, a category that includes appointment reminders and car pickup notifications as well as feedback invitations. These are not calls that build relationships or directly lead to the booking of a new appointment.
Nevertheless, Dilawri knew that these messages are important to helping customers work auto service into their busy daily lives. No one wanted to get rid of them, but they were taking up a disproportional percentage of agents' time. They were one-way communications that did not directly generate revenue, and they didn't require the expertise of a trained service professional.
