Speed vs. Quality : Responding to Auto Dealer Website Leads

It’s an age old question in the auto industry - when responding to a lead, what is more important, speed or quality?

Should we favor responding to a customer quickly, or respond with as thorough and tailored a response as possible? The issue has been debated for years, and doesn’t seem to be slowing down.

Customer attention spans are dwindling with each passing day, and the increasingly responsive and tailored experiences they receive on websites like Amazon and Google are making them even more demanding.

How can an auto dealership keep up with this trend? How can you give online shoppers what they have come to expect, with limited resources?

Auto Dealer Website Leads : Speed or Quality?

Auto dealers have found different ways of dealing with this issue.

Some choose quality over speed, and provide highly customized and tailored responses to each lead. These dealers hope that their thoroughness will impress the customer more than a quick response would have.

Others have chosen to use automated systems that respond to customers in near real-time, explaining that a salesperson will reach out to them as soon as they can. This allows the sales team to take the time they need in order to respond to each customer individually, without sacrificing on a quick response.

Gather as Much Information as Possible

There is no magic solution, but there are ways to make it easier for your sales staff to provide quality responses, even inside a short time-frame.

The most effective way of doing so is by capturing as much information as possible from your lead form. With more information, your response can be more detailed and better informed.

The more your salesperson knows about the customer when they make the initial phone call, the higher the call quality will be, irrespective of the speed.

Make Things More Personalized

If your sales team has all the required information about the prospective customer without asking them repeatedly, lead conversion rates will definitely rise by a significant number. Additionally, if your auto dealership has a data analytics solution in place, your sales team could know that a shopper had been on your website several times in the past and visited specific pages before submitting this request.

The follow-up call will be a personalized consultation for that individual. It won’t take your sales team much time to learn this information either, and receiving a customized response will make a huge difference to the potential customer.

Some experts claim that a lead should be responded to within minutes, and that auto dealers need to either utilize automated response systems, or hire enough employees to handle all the calls that come in. On the other hand, there are also others who state that quality is favored over speed. The bottom line your dealership needs to ask is this - can’t an auto dealership really have it both ways?

With today’s technology, it is perfectly possible to provide a response that is both quick and of high quality, and any dealership that does not do so will end up losing out on leads and revenue as well.

For more information on how to respond to leads in order to increase conversion rates for your auto dealership, Contact Us