Critical Communication and Collaboration is Vital to Your Automotive Dealership Success
Any business is about building relationships, and this is very prevalent in the automotive industry. There is a variety of ways to approach selling vehicles and vehicle services but meeting your business goals will always boil down to relationships — employee-customer relationships and employee-employee relationships. The number one reason relationships fail is lack of communication.
Efficient and effective communication is critical to healthy relationships and thus, your dealership operations. A dealership team that works together and communicates with one another helps keep operations running smoothly and effectively.
At any given point, a car dealership has numerous customers on-site purchasing vehicles or test-driving vehicles on the road and employees working in the sales office and services department. If communication at a dealership is lacking issues will undoubtedly domino into the customer and cause unnecessary losses in sales, service department, employee turnover, and trust in the community.
With critical communication being one of the most important pieces to dealership success, it is also one of the most difficult things to accomplish.
Good Communication is Difficult to Achieve at Automotive Dealerships
Effective communication at a car dealership is difficult to achieve because operations are very vast and complex. There is constantly a variety of moving parts and different systems being used between two total separate worlds— sales and services. The front of the house automotive sales department functions entirely differently from the back of the house service department.
Both the sales and services departments have their own requirements when it comes to being compliant and providing a consistently safe and successful work environment for their employees and customers. The service department could be worrying about ever-changing regulations from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration or the Environmental Protection Agency. While the sales department worries about remaining compliant with safeguard policies and other Federal Trade Commission requirements. Each of these focuses adds more complexity and concerns to critical communication that is needed at a dealership.
It is a lot on a dealership’s leadership team to manage on top of the goal of increasing vehicles sales and service Your dealership employees look to leadership when it comes to information regarding the dealership and the safety of employees. It is important for your dealership to have a platform that can communicate in emergency and non-urgent situations, have tools to support better communication with your teams and ways for them to communicate with each other.
Effective communication for employees and customers in a dealership is a challenging task to achieve, but with processes and software in place, it can be accomplished. Effective and efficient communication across the organization means that your employees will be more engaged and generate a stronger bottom line and better experience for your customers. But how do you get there?
3 Points for Strong Communication in your Dealership
Better communication between employees and departments will help your dealership operate more efficiently and provide a better experience for your customers but you cannot do it with just people, you need systems. Here are three ways to improve communication at your dealership.
1. Watch out for barriers that might be breaking down communication
Clear and concise messages are the most important part of effective communication. Not delivering that leaves room for errors and confusion. Long winded or unclear messages can be easily misinterpreted by your staff. Overwhelming your employees with too much information at once can cause notification fatigue and be tough for your employees to absorb. It is key to make sure you set expectations with your employees of how to go about communicating issues they might be having. Communication is a two-way street and with open channels for dialogue, this gives employees confidence to come forward with their issue or idea. Employees need to feel safe sharing feedback and concerns.
2. Honest communication will increase performance.
Like any organization, if an employee has an open and reliable communication channel to leadership, it makes it easier to connect with one another. When employees feel like they are a part of a team and not just another cog in a machine, they will be more likely to put in personal effort to help the dealership grow. Employees will take more from their work, which will contribute to the reputation of the business. As a leader, be sure to show interest in ensuring that all the employees have a voice that is heard and include them in conversations so that everyone is aware of dealership ongoings.
3. Creating effective communication will negate bad communication
One major thing that harms company morale and productivity is bad communication such as undisclosed information, a lack of messaging, and other restrictive communication practices. These poor communication issues can easily be avoided with open and up to date information about what is going on in the dealership.
Improving communication in your dealership is not just a quick change, but a cultural change that takes time. It is something that needs to be implemented, practiced, and rewarded daily to achieve the goal of excellent communication.
Communication between you and your employees is ever-changing. To have effective communication, there needs to be constant reevaluation and improvements of the systems in place as issues arise. These types of habits will create that culture you are looking for and achieve adding to the bottom line but will also create a level of trust with your employees as well.
Empower your dealership employees by delivering the information they need when they need it. Whether an emergency or scheduled/ routine update, share critical communications with your staff to keep everyone informed and actionable across all channels.
How Can Rave Mobile Safety Improve Your Dealership Communication?
Rave’s Critical Communication and Collaboration Platform provide employee safety and communications for thousands of organizations across North America. Leverage Rave to unify your dealership’s critical response and collaboration experience under one user-friendly umbrella that can be customized based on your needs. Though emergencies are the first thing to come to mind our solution increases day-to-day operational efficiencies.
Empower your dealership employees by delivering the information they need when they need it. Whether an emergency or scheduled/ routine update, share critical communications with your staff to keep everyone informed and actionable across all channels. Our platform is purpose–built to support all your dealership needs. See all the different use cases and ways Rave can help you today below.
