Are Your Dealership’s Sales and Service Departments in Sync?

You probably recognized long ago how your dealership sales and service departments can work together to generate revenue for your dealership. The sales department can offer service contracts on new or used cars, while the service department can refer customers to sales when vehicles start reaching their end of life.

However, at many dealerships, the communication between departments stops there. To keep your entire dealership running smoothly, it's important for these two separate departments with different operations to work and communicate with each other, especially when it comes to managing keys. Consider the effects of siloed sales and service departments.

 

  

One of the biggest challenges of sales and service working together is tracking inventory across the two departments. For example, think about what happens one department takes a vehicle key from the other and doesn’t properly log the activity or even tell anybody they have the key. A customer walks into your showroom and requests to test drive a specific car in certain interior and exterior colors. They’ve been searching the internet for weeks for this particular combination and you’re the only dealership in the area with their dream car.

Your website and CRM indicate that the car is on the lot, but the sales rep is unable to find the key on the pegboard. The rep checks with multiple people in your sales department but is still unable to find the key. The customer refuses to test drive a different car since they came for that specific vehicle and leaves after an extensive wait.

Later that afternoon it’s discovered that a service rep had taken the car to the back for routine service and failed to mark it in the key log. This lack of communication lost you a sale.

Knowing who accesses keys and when isn’t just a good security practice; it’s also a way to keep your dealership operations running smoothly and to give your customers a better, quicker experience. If you’re looking for an electronic key control system, be sure you choose an option that logs key access automatically and can give you a complete picture of where a key has been anytime you log in.

Just as your various departments can work together to make sure everybody is making money, you can see they also need to communicate in order to not lose even one customer.

Carl Sewell, a successful dealer in Texas, once wrote that one of his customers is worth $517,000 over their lifetime. How much is each of your customers worth to you? What can your dealership do to keep a careless mistake from costing you a long-term loyal customer and revenue source?

In the situation we described earlier, a centralized key management system would have helped the sales rep instantly see who had the vehicle key when they made the request. The car would have been found, the customers likely would have bought it, and you would have been one step closer to having a customer for life.

Whether you have a single lot or a sprawling family of dealerships, knowing where keys are is crucial to making you money. How many times have you lost keys due to poor communication between departments?