Part of being the car industry is having to deal with the endless recalls, negative news stories and stories about fuel fluctuations that can just turn into a headache. Many car dealers take the tack of just not addressing it at all and leave it up to the manufacturer to reach out to owners.
If you do this, you are missing an opportunity to promote your business and gain market share by increasing your social value.
Social media to the rescue
You can call, you can email and you can mail notices but you shouldn’t miss out on the opportunity to broadcast notices via social media. Not only will you reach a lot of your customers, you will be reaching potential customers as well.
Broadcast links about bad news and recalls get a lot of clicks, if you are the source of those links – you go up in peoples esteem and that is good for business even if the bad news relates to what you sold.
Knowing the importance of who isn’t there
Engaging with customers online is important for managing good customer service ratings, but not for the reasons you think. While talking with the customers you know is good, the real benefit comes from the people you don’t know about who are witnessing the exchange.
Even if someone lurking on the thread about a recall lives 8 states away and will never buy a car from you – chances are they know someone locally and can play a role influencing their buying decisions. This is a phenomenon called social proof that is hitting businesses hard and it is unique to social media.
On social media, friends promote businesses to friends not because they had good buying experiences, but because they associate the business with a value in life or a specific lifestyle. The more you are seen being proactive and accountable to your customers, the more you begin to represent that to others.
That you sell cars is incidental, you become a representative of a certain type of lifestyle that people want to be a part of. If being a part of it means owning one of your cars, then that is what they will do or encourage someone they care about to do.
Be proactive
Mailings are a thing of the past. Calling or emailing customers to let them know of recalls or other issues is proactive and can benefit the social proof your business carries locally. You don’t need to hire someone to crawl through your data base and contact everyone in the system, but a quick search of return buyers that are affected merit a direct contact.
You will increase your CSI and also garner potential online positive interactions as well. As for the rest of the database, maintain business as usual for contacting owners about any news they should know. The only exception should be for your fleet customers.
If they are customers you only saw ten years ago, this is also a way to put your business back in the forefront of their mind as they come up on needing to replace their fleet cars or trucks.