8 unique ways to provide a better customer experience than your competition

On the latest episode of Mind Your Own Business, host Jonathan Dawson, founder of Sellchology, discusses eight ways car dealers can out-experience their competition. Dealers that provide a better customer experience will give themselves a sizable advantage and improve retention rates.

Not all customers view the transactions the same way. Dawson says he calls this the YOLO effect. The YOLO effect is what you do to cause a customer to say ‘you only live once’ and decide to buy from your dealership. They not only buy, but pay a premium to do so. Dawson’s eight principles include:

Making life easier. Anytime your life gets easier, you may say, take my money. Ease is the one way, we can use psychology to turn down the price sensitivity that the customer may have when buying a car. Dawson asks the question, how easy is it to do business with you? What process changes have you made to make buying a car from you easy?

Putting forth extra effort. Dawson asks the question, what is your team doing to exert that extra effort? He says if they do bring the extra effort, customers are willing to buy.

The efficiency of a customer’s visit to your dealership. How many times in your life you’ve paid more money because you want something to happen faster? Can you make things quicker without rushing customers? Dawson says, in the next sales meeting ask your employees, how and where can you make things more efficient?

Educating the customer. Whenever we’re being educated our brains tell us, it’s okay to pay money for this education. It’s easy to sell a car but are you educating the customer on the process? You need to teach employees how to use an educational selling approach not just being transactional.

Showing off expert staffers. Expertise is paying money to specifically work with an expert. On your sales team, are the members certified or accredited? Position your team as the expert in the marketplace.

Entertaining the customer while at the store. You need to make sure your customer is having a great experience. What are you doing to entertain your buyers?

The environment of the dealership. Dawson says some dealerships have put little to no thought into the actual environment they’ve created for their customer. The environment dictates whether or not a person feels comfortable paying you money. Ask your team to go around the building and look for areas where the environment should be adjusted or aren’t paying enough attention to the details.

Exclusivity of the experience and the result. When a person feels that what they experience is truly unique or special, their brain justifies paying a premium for it. You have a unique opportunity to out-experience your competition.

Have your team go through this list and have them identify things that they are doing or things they think they should be doing to elevate the customer experience.