Paul, Author at Konvergence

Dealership Parking Problems – 1. Why Do They Happen?

Many dealerships have parking problems which have a negative effect on both customer experience as well as employee productivity. This post is the first in a series of three that we are writing to help dealership teams who are looking for a way to solve this problem themselves.

If you want us to let you know when we publish parts 2 and 3 then just get in touch or subscribe to our blog.

Want to solve dealership parking problems? – First think about ‘demand’

To understand your dealership parking problems you need to start by thinking about parking ‘demand’.

During the course of the day, the total number of cars at a dealership will change. Underlying this change is a predictable pattern. To help describe this pattern we will use a ‘seaside’ analogy as most people are familiar with how that works. [Read more…]

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Dealership Customer Experience Tracking – Our Tips & Guidance

customer experience at dealerships Dealership customer experience tracking uses tried and tested observational research tools and techniques adapted specifically for dealership customers.

Customer experience tracking involves watching customers in your environments to understand more about them. There are simple questions about customer behaviour that many organisations can answer in detail about their digital customers but can only answer with assumptions and anecdotal information about their ‘real’ customers. These can be as simple as ‘Who are they?’ and ‘What do they do when they are with us?’

At Konvergence we have been tracking customers in our projects for over 12 years. We have refined the tools and techniques we use to track customers to make sure we can capture as much useful information as we can.

Here are some guidelines you can use to structure your own customer tracking: [Read more…]

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How to Plan a Dealership Customer Experience Research Project – Advice, Tips & Tricks

When you are developing your plan for a dealership customer experience research project, (see Dealership Discovery), you will need to make some decisions about strategy before you can plan in any detail about what exactly you will do. As with any field research, you need to make some ‘higher level’ decisions before you will be able to work out who will do what, where, when and for how long.

With these decisions in mind, we have listed some questions that you can use to prompt discussion with your team. With each question, we have given you our thoughts on what to think about, along with some tips and tricks that we have learnt along the way.

What should we focus our dealership customer experience research on?

dealership forecourt browsing study — Study activities could focus on forecourt browsing

Your study should identify opportunities to solve problems, make improvements or reduce waste. At dealerships we have developed studies to improve wayfinding, forecourt browsing, queueing, parking, facilities utilisation (such as service bays), employee efficiency and reducing waste. [Read more…]

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Dealership Customer Experience Interviews – Tips and Guidance

We use dealership customer experience interviews as one of the core techniques of Dealership Discovery, a research and consultancy programme designed to improve experience and efficiency in physical dealership environments.

Our tips below will give you an ideal way to start planning your own dealership customer experience interviews. [Read more…]

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Christmas is Coming – Can’t Wait! – Our Tips to Improve Christmas Queues for Shoppers

“I’ve done mine!” “What?” “My Christmas shopping!”

I’m guessing everybody knows a friend who will say this around about now. When I hear it, I start to feel the dread of Xmas shopping and getting caught up in the crowds. So if I can help you improve Christmas queues then I am doing something for all reluctant shoppers like me.

Like many consumers my age I feel I have everything I need – apart from time – and over the next few weeks I’ll be giving it away. ‘Shop online’, I hear you say. I mostly do, and always plan to go shopping at quieter times. But every year I still find myself trapped in a store, a supermarket or shopping centre – wasting time. I’m not alone!

If I’m thinking about Christmas queuing and how to avoid it, then I hope store managers are too. They know today’s shoppers are less tolerant and more precious about their time. Most of us are used to the convenience of Amazon and would pay a premium for better service. Waiting just feels like we are getting second-class. They must know that given a bad queuing experience we might abandon our purchase or on sight of a queue not even enter their store. Given the choice of an alternative, most of us would take it and then tell all our friends on social media how bad it was. [Read more…]

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