Jim Ellis Automotive Group

Speaker

Creating a truly better car-buying experience.  (No, really!)

SITUATION

Jim Ellis is an Atlanta based, family-operated multi-brand automotive dealership, founded on family values and service. The company’s tagline, “Expect the best,” has been around since the firm was founded by in 1970.

Jimmy Ellis, son of founder Jim Ellis, shares his father’s passion for what he calls, “customer care,” and is always looking for ways to improve it. Although he faced no specific burning issues, Jimmy approached Mike Wittenstein about finding ways to further raise the bar on brand experience for customers, and widen his lead on his competitors.

Specifically, he was looking for a way to up the stakes for his sales and management staff at their National Kick-off Breakfast.

OPPORTUNITY

Further extend the dealership’s competitive advantage by introducing a new market driver to a market becoming increasingly disintermediated by the web and other channels. In short, recommend improvements to its already-legendary customer experience.

SOLUTION

Provide an Experience Makeover, utilizing Mystery Shopping, Executive Alignment, and Operations Planning, then introduce it at the National Breakfast with a keynote introduction built around “testimonials from the future.”

The process began with mystery shops of two dealerships, one Hyundai, the other VW, going so far as to take delivery on new vehicles and drive them off the lot. We returned immediately to intervene with the sales person and sales manager, not to find fault, but to celebrate the things that had gone right and collaboratively identify opportunities to strengthen the brand experience even further.

This allowed Jim Ellis management to step into the customer’s shoes and view the operation (through videos of the mystery shops) from the customer’s perspective. Other techniques supplemented the mystery shops, including pictures taken inside the dealerships, management interventions and executive team facilitations to help build support core innovations and how to deliver them to staff and customers. We then prepared customer “testimonials from the future” to illustrate what the new experience could look and feel like.

RESULTS

From this process, the Ellis family funded an Innovation Initiative, which launched at the beginning of Summer 2010.

The keynote presentation was truly transformational for some, helping them understand why they’re in business and to recommit to those reasons.

It is built around three specific initiatives for improving a customer’s brand experience:

1. Put the customer in the right vehicle, as defined by the customer’s desired combination of features, price and availability, not a salesperson’s incentive goal or the simple availability of a car on the lot.
2. Make the car-buying process easier and faster, showing a respect for the customer’s time.
3. Take the mystery out of pricing and negotiation.  To enhance the relationship the salesperson should be building with the customer, empower that salesperson to speak transparently about price and negotiate a deal without the predictable, “Let me ask my Sales Manager” ruse.  Distance Jim Ellis even further than they already are from the stereotypical behaviors, confusing paperwork and poor selling skills so prevalent in the industry.

Although concrete sales results are obviously too early to read, the Jim Ellis Automotive Group has an even clearer focus of why they’re in business. They’ve built better hiring criteria. They’ve equipped employees with more compelling ways to engage with customers. And they established a clear messaging path for print, radio, TV and Internet advertising. All of which was crafted to collectively increase word of mouth referrals from customers, prospects and employees.