Press

Porsche dealers beat other brands when it comes to responding to online customer inquiries, found a U.S. study.

The brand topped the 2016 Pied Piper PSI Internet Lead Effectiveness Benchmarking study, which measures how auto dealers responded to customer inquiries received online.

BMW and MINI dealerships were deemed the most improved brands compared to the previous year, said Pied Piper Management LLC, the company behind the study.

But overall, the auto industry average performance has failed to improve over the past three years, even dropping slightly from 2015-2016.

The company noted half of customers received responses within 30 minutes, but one customer in every eleven failed to receive a response of any type within 24 hours.

“There are three reasons for poor performance,” said Fran O’Hagan, President and CEO of Pied Piper Management Company LLC.

“First of all, this is a part of the business that’s invisible to management unless management is vigilant and pays attention to what is really happening. Secondly, it’s not easy to be perfect every hour of every day, with customer inquiries never falling through the cracks. And third, we often see failures of third party CRM software, and these failures are usually invisible to the client.”

Only six brands, including Acura, BMW, Chevrolet, Ford, MINI and Mitsubishi, have improved their performance every year for the past three years, said the company.

Pied Piper also found that dealers had different approaches for responses.

Lexus dealers, who ranked second in the study, usually responded quickly by email and answered a customer’s specific question 69 per cent of the time, but attempted to follow up by phone only 20 per cent of the time.

By contrast, Ford dealers, who also ranked high, responded quickly to email, answered the customer’s question 21 per cent of the time but attempted to follow up by phone 70 per cent of the time.