Welcome to the first of our C It Now video mailers, which comes from CarShop in Swindon this week.
The aim is to provide you with a weekly video update, sharing information and best practice; hopefully, helpful information that you can put into practise at your own car dealership
This week is all about the new video archive feature and the way that Stafford Audi have gone about making the most of this functionality.
I received the following e-mail from Ken Potter, Brand Manager at VW Crewe who has been using C It Now for 2 weeks.
I’m getting bored of telling you how good the system is working for us. We put an Eos on the web yesterday afternoon with no pictures and received an enquiry this morning. Ash showed the car to the customer who was 200 miles away and took a deposit!
Ken is a great advocate. No excuses, no lazy sales people, no lack of stock, in fact no negatives at all, just positives.
But Ken's smart. He'd already worked out that pre-recorded video was working for his business. Being able to offer a live video presentation was simply the next step to providing an extra level of service and engagement. If a customer is on your dealer web site and keen enough to call you, what a great opportunity to show the car, live, now, and then take a deposit.
There are a couple of interesting points about Ken's C It Now sale. Firstly, it happened mid week. This is a great time to make additional sales when you won't find 'walk-ins' for love nor money.
Secondly, he sold it without a photograph.
I'm not denying that photographs help, they do. But they don't provide a detailed condition report. A live video presentation where the customer can direct the sales person to what they want to see is far more effective and helps the customer make a decision.
What do you think? Is Ken right to embrace a live video tour?
I'll be talking to Ken in person again soon when I hope to share his views on the subject.
At the end of the summer I went to visit some friends in Aarhus, Denmark with my three kids. It’s a great holiday for lots of reasons. The most important from my kids point of view, was the lack of queueing for rides at Djurs Sommerland, Denmark’s answer to Disneyland. Danish and German school holidays are well and truly over which means we can give Thors Hammer a good hammering.
I’m truly glad to get back to the car by the end of the day.
In this case we'd hired a Sixt hire car, a very pleasant Honda Civic. I hired it from Aarhus Airport booking it online when I’d arrived in Denmark the previous day. I have to say, the Sixt experience was far and away the best car hire experience I’ve ever had.
In fairness location did help as the airport is small and also empty when I turned up at midday to collect my car, so no queueing again. There was only one Sixt person to sort out the paperwork which was all done very quickly and efficiently. It was the way that he did it that was really good.
There was no mention of extra insurance; my driving licence was only needed for a moment and there was no discussion about the paper bit which was neatly filed back in the UK. Because I had purchased the car hire from a Danish IP address I was not offered unlimited mileage which he corrected once the contract was printed. He also upgraded my car; okay, probably because he didn’t have anything else, but it all added to my experience. He was a very personable guy who during the admin process talked about his school days in England and how much he’d enjoyed it.
By the end I felt like I was borrowing a car from him, not hiring from an anonymous car hire company.
The product was great and totally exceeded any expectation that had been created by a really good online booking process.
This had expectation levels similar to C It Now, our live video presentation tool. We consistently score at least 9 out of 10 on our exit questionnaire once car purchasers have had a live video demo.