JAZEL AUTO BLOG

Jazel’s Problem-Solving Series #5: Lackluster Customer Tools

By Jazel Auto Marketing

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“Before you view the rest of this blog post, create a quick user account to save and review your favorite articles!”

Can you imagine if a prompt like that popped up? You’re just trying to take a look at something mildly interesting, maybe save it for later, and we want your information before you can do that.

And yet, this happens all the time on dealership sites. 

 

Dealership Website Problem #5: Lackluster Customer Tools

We’ll use good ol’ Mark the car-shopper from our last post as an example:

Mark is browsing new cars on his computer at home. His wife comes to tell him that dinner is about to be ready, and asks him to set the table. So he gives the car one last glance, and clicks the “Save Vehicle” button beside it. 

Then boom! A prompt jumps up asking him to login with his Facebook or Twitter to save this vehicle in his favorites. There’s also a “Create an account with email” options under these. He doesn’t have time to do that right now, doesn’t even have a Twitter, and wouldn’t want to sign in with any of his accounts even if he had the time (few customers do). Annoyed, he just closes the page. 

“Whatever, I’ll find something else later.” He thinks. And later, he does. At a different dealership. 

As small as it may seem, this is how many shopping journeys go. Small moments change the course of a shopper’s path, until they end up at the final purchase. That’s why so much of website management and design is about maximizing those small moments – making the best possible impression in those short moments. 

Here’s the thing: making someone sign in for a simple task is a pretty obvious (and unnecessary) lead generation tactic. Getting a shopper to leave a reluctant lead isn’t doing you any favors, and may actually be turning them off. 

 

How To Solve It: 

Make your more site shopper-friendly.

Check out what we do with our dealership Customer Shopping Portal: 

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Shoppers can save their favorite vehicles and receive price alerts on your site whether or not they choose to create an account. Without so much as a second click, users can retrieve their recently viewed vehicle, favorites/saved vehicles, and price change alerts while on the same device. 

If they want to receive email alerts for these vehicles, or look at these between devices, they can choose to sign in with secure services like Facebook, Google, and Amazon, or create their own account.  

Our Customer Shopping Portal is designed to make the experience of shopping for a car as easy as possible – by allowing customers to shop like they want to shop. 

In summary: Your website should be helpful, not a hassle.

 

Conclusion

There’s a pretty persistent problem among dealership websites that extends far beyond this single issue. It happens when dealers and their website providers look at the site as a tool to increase sales, and nothing else. 

What follows is poor user experience, lead-pestering, and ultimately fewer sales and repeat customers. 

We haven’t seen the last of this theme. Stay tuned for the next post in our dealership online problem-solving series!