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Friday, Mar 29, 2024

Video Links Keyes to Car Buyers

Despite the ubiquity of ecommerce, people still have to buy their new automobiles from dealerships – and they still distrust salespeople. Keyes Automotive Group Inc. in Van Nuys understands that, so the company has begun offering car shoppers live and interactive video tours of their desired vehicles through the dealerships’ websites in hopes of building trust and converting shoppers into buyers. The service is implemented at Keyes’ 15 dealerships throughout the Valley and Valencia, and it takes the trend of pre-purchase online research a step further. Larry West has put the new software-based tool through four months of testing as general manager of Keyes Honda in Van Nuys, where it’s up and running. He said the video platform by DropIn Auto, a division of DropIn Inc. in Los Angeles, is the newest method of communication between salespeople and consumers in nearly nine years since online chats and email exchanges between car shoppers and salespeople became routine. More importantly, the video service converts twice as many shoppers into buyers and it’s cheaper than any other method Keyes Honda pays for to get sales leads, he added. “What I’ve been noticing with internet communication is that it’s been impersonal – a back and forth that doesn’t connect clients to the store,” West said. But with DropIn Auto, he said, potential customers “develop a visceral connection to the car because they can see it, and a visceral connection to a salesperson. And if the car isn’t right for them, they don’t have to drive down here.” Vehicle tours Car shopping happens almost entirely online today, including determining a purchase price, experts say. According to West, consumers spend 21 days and 15 hours researching cars before they buy. Dealerships for years have been posting photos and pre-recorded videos of new and used vehicles on their lots along with the price, which is usually – West says – below sticker price. The next decision facing shoppers is where they will buy the car, and that’s where West sees the video service as the most effective conversion tool yet. “All their research has led them to this car,” West explained. “Once they arrive at my website, I want to make it easier to move forward.” Automotive dealership consultants Jimmy Vee and Travis Miller, founders of Rich Dealers in Orlando, Fla., said in an email to the Business Journal that in today’s market, price determines how consumers shop and buy their cars, and it’s turning the industry into a commodity business. “The lack of quality salesmanship and access to information has trained consumers to do their own research prior to buying,” Vee and Miller said. However, they feel consumers really prefer help with the whole process. “As the world becomes more connected by technology and less personal, it opens an opportunity for personal service to make a comeback,” the consultants said. Keyes Honda sees DropIn Auto as providing that lost personal touch through today’s medium of choice. To use the service, visitors to the Keyes Honda website first locate the new or used vehicle they want, and click on the large red rectangular bar below the price offering a live streaming video tour. That click sends a message to the showroom, where a salesperson will answer with their DropIn Auto-enabled smartphone and walk the viewer to the vehicle on the lot. The video tour of the car is one-way – shoppers can see and hear the salesperson, but the salesperson can’t see the shopper. The shopper can talk in real time or via online chat. Julio Estrella, a Keyes Honda salesperson, said he primarily shows callers how much space the car has and rear and front visibility. “They see your point-of-view,” Estrella said. “You put the phone up close to your head, and we have to sit in the driver’s seat and turn around to show the view out of the rear window.” Callers also want to see how smartphone-enabled features work, he added. DropIn Auto has a few distinguishing features from similar face-to-face live video platforms that dealerships have used such as Apple Inc.’s FaceTime. One, DropIn works with any smartphone; two, the video and audio are in sync with no delays or pixilation, according to West. Third and most important is that the caller is anonymous. While trying out the software service, Keyes Honda learned many callers would hang up when they realized the video tour involved showing their face to the salesperson. So they modified the software; now there’s a pop-up alert that tells people they won’t be seen by the salesperson. “Anonymity allows people to have a lot of confidence and peace of mind, and the consumer gets to control what the next step is,” West said. Conversion For Keyes Honda, out of the 4 percent of website visitors who use DropIn Auto’s live tour, 30 percent buy a vehicle, said Louis Ziskin, chief executive of DropIn Inc. The company, which is in the process of moving to West Hollywood from Los Angeles, charges a monthly fee of $795 for the live tours, plus an extra $500 to include the link in a maximum of 300 emails a month between salespeople and shoppers, and a $1,000 one-time set up fee for training. The monthly fee puts the service on 20 salespeople’s phones but only 10 can be active at any time. The service also records the calls and leaves them accessible for 30 days. So far, 26 dealerships pay for the services, Ziskin added, who plans to raise his prices next month. The service could potentially be competition for companies that sell sales leads to dealerships, such as auto makers themselves, and businesses including car shopping and information platform Edmunds.com Inc. But the Santa Monica company doesn’t see it that way, said Nick Gorton, Edmunds’ vice president of product innovation. He said such services are complementary because they “help streamline the shopper and dealer connection.” Consumers mostly visit Edmunds.com to conduct research for car-buying, but the site offers online services as part of the customer leads it supplies to dealers, Gorton said. For example, it has a CarCode texting platform so dealers and potential buyers can communicate, and a Facebook Messenger chat bot. Edmunds.com introduced them because traditional lead generation doesn’t translate well to mobile devices. “We think there is a place in the ecosystem for all kinds of connections – chat, messaging platforms, video, etc. as all of these ultimately provide more satisfaction to both car buyers and dealers,” Gorton said. Building trust The DropIn service is easy to use technically but making a good video while also trying to sell a vehicle requires training and oversight. DropIn spends about a month training the sales team how to use the software and embed it in emails. Not everyone is a natural star, Ziskin said, and after watching thousands of videos done by salespeople, his team has learned what works and what prompts quick hang-ups. Such as when the salesperson answers the call by staring into the phone. “People expect to see a car; they don’t expect to see a face,” he explained. Also fundamental to the software service’s success is buy-in from top management who need to make sure calls are answered. DropIn monitors answered and missed calls, and Ziskin said the team found one dealership received around 12 calls a day that were never answered during its testing period. West agreed, saying there can be initial pushback from the staff against the service because it’s new and different – a natural tendency. “As soon as a (sales) team sees a leader behind it, and that it’s winning, they quickly adopt,” West explained. The biggest challenge for dealerships is building shoppers’ trust. That’s what Ziskin and West say, and data from DropIn Auto calls confirm it. Seventy percent of video callers ask if the cars they are being shown are really on the dealerships’ lots. “The industry has a stigma where people don’t trust car dealerships,” Ziskin said. “(Shoppers) don’t like driving down and finding the car they want is gone. But the technology exists where we can build a new relationship.” With mobile communications and online car research playing such huge roles in the car shopping process, Vee and Miller, the dealership consultants, have a positive opinion of DropIn Auto’s personal approach. “The DropIn Auto service/platform fits nicely between the two worlds,” the pair said. “It leverages the opportunities technology affords us, but also leverages people.” However, such techniques are still not personal enough, they added, because they separate the salesperson from the shopper and force the shopper to do the majority of research themselves, “which systematically reduces the value a dealership provides.”

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