Three Tips to Create Fireworks With Your Customers on July Fourth

We've all heard about the spark that people feel when they fall in love.

We want your customers to feel that spark when they're purchasing a car from you.

Nix that.

We want them to feel fireworks — and not just measly sparklers.

We want your customers to feel the grand finale fireworks.

To make those fireworks happen, follow these tips.

Train Your Staff

How can you expect your salespeople to provide excellent service if you don't train them? Every dealership has different standards for service — make sure your employees know yours and can reach them. If your employees don't know what you expect, they can't perform to your standards.

Use call recording software to train your new employees on how to handle phone calls. Before they start taking calls, they can listen to recorded calls to learn how to properly handle angry customers, prospects and client satisfaction calls.

Once they've listened to enough calls to get the hang of it, implement call scanning software to monitor their performance. Using speech-recognition technology, it will scan calls for certain keywords or phrases, such as "thank you," "ma'am" or "have a good day." This will save you time from going through hours of phone calls yourself while ensuring your staff adheres to call handling policies.

Be Friendly

This might seem obvious, but always smile when you're helping a customer. Sometimes it's hard to remember to smile every time you're face-to-face with a customer, especially if you spend most of your time on the phone. But if you come across like Grumpy Cat, your customers are going to get offended and head right over to your competition.

If you start off on the wrong foot, it will take you 12 positive experiences to make up for one bad one. Chances are, if you've already frustrated and offended a customer, you won't have 12 opportunities to make up the bad experience. Remember to be friendly every time you talk to a customer so you don't have to try to save face after a bad day.

Listen to Feedback

Your customers know firsthand whether you provide good service or not, so listen to them when they give you feedback. If you don't know what's lacking, how can you improve it? To be proactive about getting feedback, use automated surveys after your phone calls.

Whether you're finishing up with a prospect or following up after you've made a sale, you can use the surveys to gauge how effective your service was. Simply tell the prospect or customer to stay on the line, and an automatic recording will ask them questions they can respond to using the phone keypad. This is the quickest and most efficient way to get feedback on your service, so you'll know exactly what areas need improvement.

Have a safe and happy Fourth of July! After you test out these tips on the Fourth, check out our suggestions on phone etiquette.