Customer Counting
Identify lost car sales opportunities
Our objective is to provide automotive retailers with an accurate automatic data feed of sales opportunities visiting its forecourts so that they can identify lost sales opportunitites and the potential causes.
Why count customers?
With the radical changes in consumer behaviour and attitudes towards car ownership, traditional practices and measures in automotive retail are no longer enough to manage and shape businesses on a day to day basis.
Customer counting helps dealerships to increase sales by selling to customers they didn’t realise they had and identifying barriers to sale.
Customer counting has become one of the ‘must haves’ and key measures within mainstream retail. When combined with transaction data to establish conversion rates, not only does it provide performance KPI’s, but can also help to identify lost opportunities, why customers haven’t bought, data captured, the effectiveness of marketing and an ongoing indicator as to customer experience.
Metrics, which are currently difficult to create or capture using traditional or manual methodologies in a dealership and automotive retail.
Conversion Rates
Sales divided by customers on the forecourt, easy! However, in the absence of customer counting, conversion rate is usually calculated using qualified customer numbers recorded on the DMS, and as we know though not all details get collected.
A sales driven culture and traditional quallification processes leads to salespeople not wanting to be held accountable for less than average performance, so often only record what they feel are genuine buyers, which has a major influence on conversion rates and renders them ineffectual as a measure.
With the change in consumer buying habits and only an estimated 1.5 forecourt visits to each sale now, (which means that nearly 70% of browsers on the forecourt are in the buying frame of mind), capturing information, adhering to process and delivering an exceptional customer experience to every visitor is a must.
Dealerships and brands invest heavily to drive customers to the forecourt, why fall at the last hurdle?
Measuring the experience
Customer counting is an ultimate measure as to customer experience, if people aren’t happy, they will leave without buying or leaving details, impacting conversion rates which with time and date stamping gives a snapshot of what is happening on the forecourt at any particular time.
What can be measured?
Converstion rates will allow automotive retailers to identify several key aspects of the day to day forecourt profile to be able to optimise all opportunities and drive sales, often with only small operational adjustments.
AVERAGE DAILY CONVERSION RATES, what is causing below average conversion on certain days? Identifying and countering these variations can lead to significant increases in stock turn.
POTENTIAL MISSED OPPORTUNITIES, how many sales could have potentially been made against actual sales.
QUALIFIED CUSTOMER DATA, average conversion of the number of customers coming onto the forecourt and captured for CRM.
STAFF SCHEDULES & OPTIMUM RATIO’S, are pre-booked appointments cannibalising walk on’s and impacting on sales.
How to count customers?
Our customer counting tool uses the latest automatic number plate (ANPR) technology, combined with its proprietary machine learning algorithms and behavioural analysis which can remove staff, deliveries, service customers, drop off’s and non customers, to act as a guide as to the number of sales opportunities visiting the forecourt by hour on a daily basis.
The machine learning and behavioural algorithms have been developed over a number of years through experience in widely differing shopping environments throughout main stream retail over the past 25 years.
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