Recent Press

For a while, some car dealerships have seemed somewhat ambivalent about e-mail inquiries from consumers. Sure, they represented potential sales leads. But it was assumed that online shoppers were even less serious about buying than on-site looky-loos. How commissions are usually doled out to dealership staffers further complicates matters. Nonetheless, because modern-day consumers demand info via the Web—and more importantly, because answering Internet inquiries quickly and accurately boosts sales—dealerships have been dramatically improving how they handle online shoppers.

In a new mystery shopper study conducted by Pied Piper Management, nearly half of auto dealerships (48%) responded to online inquiries in an impressive 30 minutes or less. Two years ago, it took an hour for the same percentage of inquiries to get responses from dealerships.

The reason for speeding up the response time is obvious. “Doing well in that area pays off in incremental sales,” Fran O'Hagan, president of Pied Piper, told WardsAuto. “The entire industry has improved because of that.”

“The reason you are seeing this huge improvement is that there is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow,” O'Hagan said to Automotive News. “With most programs, improvement usually happens incrementally. Not so with how you handle Internet leads. This results in huge changes, right away.”