November 18, 2019 Article You asked, we listened: A recap of Xperience Copied You asked, we listened: A recap of Xperience By Darrel Ferguson At Xtime, you are at the center of everything we do. Understanding what is and isn’t working for you fuels our innovation and helps us to make a positive impact for your customers, employees, operations, and bottom line through our products. With this clear priority in mind, we recently hosted Xperience, the first-ever Xtime user summit designed to help you improve your business and take full advantage of everything Xtime has to offer. Here is a quick recap and a few of the highlights of the two-day virtual conference, as well as some key takeaways that you can implement at your dealership. Full Utilization of Xtime We want you to get the most out of your Xtime products. The know-how to leverage Xtime tools to the best of your dealership’s ability improves the customer experience, your employees’ engagement, and boosts your bottom line. Full utilization of Xtime means setting processes, looking at reporting, holding staff accountable, and ensuring management sets the bar and leads by example. You’ll be able to improve productivity and retain loyal service customers because you are giving them the experience they expect. The goal of 100% utilization is a process, and your Xtime performance manager is available to help you with your utilization goals as they work with you and your team to improve your service department. Dealer Panel One of the best sessions from Xperience was our dealer panel, which brought together representatives of three different dealerships from throughout the country to discuss fixed ops. The panel shared ideas on everything from offering rideshare options to text messaging as a way to improve the customer experience and more efficiently follow up on declined services. One common theme throughout the panel discussion was the importance of adapting to a constantly changing industry. New technologies and tools are designed to make life easier for customers and service department personnel, and implementing those new technologies almost always involves some learning curve. In the end, the panel concluded that fixed ops can’t fall behind other industry experiences that are being pioneered by companies like Amazon and Apple. Today’s customers demand efficiency and a superior service experience. As new technologies make their lives easier, dealerships have to be willing to adapt. Thought Leaders During the event, Xtime performance managers and industry leaders shared their thoughts on a variety of topics impacting fixed operations. Isabelle Helms, vice president of research and market intelligence with Cox Automotive, delivered a particularly fascinating presentation on “winning the war for talent” and the impact of employees in fixed ops. Her message to dealers: hiring and keeping top talent is more difficult than ever. In fact, nearly 50 percent of service advisors turnover within a year. Even worse, 1/3 of dealership staff employees are not engaged or excited about their jobs. In this climate, it is more important than ever for dealers to connect with their employees. She suggests 10 key drivers to improve employee engagement. Nurture a workplace environment that supports employees’ ability to be successful. Ensure that employees feel valued for their work through recognition and rewards. Give employees an opportunity to be heard and take their ideas seriously. Promote an environment that makes employees proud to work for your company. Help your employees see that your company is headed in the right direction. Give employees everything they need to make a lifelong career at your company. Nurture a workplace environment where people like and trust their fellow workers. Offer competitive pay. Give back to the community. Promote the enjoyment and opportunities of working in a rapidly changing environment. Our Priorities Perhaps more than anything, Xperience underscored our top priorities as a company: listening, innovating, and partnering with you to ensure your success. 1. Listening – Our first priority has always been to listen to our dealer partners. As our experienced performance mangers meet with you, they help you to implement and utilize innovative technology to reach your business goals. But they also listen to your feedback so that we can find ways to improve our offerings to better meet your needs. We always encourage you to send your feedback. It’s the reason we send out frequent Xtime surveys. It’s also the reason we recently implemented a Dealer Advisory Board to discuss the challenges in fixed operations that you face. 2. Innovating – We don’t just innovate for the sake of innovation. We evolve and create so you can meet your customers where they are and grow your fixed operations. When we design new solutions, we ask ourselves one question: Does this improve the customer experience? For us, improving the customer experience must focus on 1) customer retention, 2) customer expectations, and 3) dealership productivity. As long as our innovations check all three boxes to give customers a reason to return, facilitating a better customer experience, and leading to a path of increased efficiency and profit for dealerships, we’re doing right by you. 3. Partnering – We are in this together. Your success is our end goal. From our increased client support efforts to events like Xperience, we are dedicated to giving you timely responses to your questions and concerns. We are incredibly passionate about working with you to to grow service revenue, our performance mangers invest time with you individually and our company continues to invest in studies and research to help shed light on industry trends to move you into the future. If you weren’t able to join us, or if you want a quick refresher on some of the information discussed, you can enjoy Xperience on demand.
