Over the years, the way customers want to communicate with your dealership has changed. Customers are ditching phone and email to contact your brand via social, WhatsApp and messaging apps.
But hey, don’t just take our word for it. A recent survey of consumers found that over 78% preferred messaging businesses they buy from over contacting them via phone or email.
And it doesn’t take a genius to see why. Messaging as a channel is more time efficient (for both you and the customer) and therefore cheaper than phone and email. In other words, the more messaging the better (excuse the bias 😅).
While teams have used typical metrics like marketing-qualified leads (MQLs), customer satisfaction rating (CSat) and net promoter score (NPS) for years, no metric accurately measured how businesses are engaging with customers. And that’s why we created The Messaging Engaged Contacts (MECs) Index, a new perspective on customer communication & experience.
It’s how we categorize customers that get this kind of experience →
In a nutshell, MECs are people that have had meaningful conversations with your dealership or workshop, either with a human or chatbot, via a real-time, one-to-one messaging channel.
Why should you care about MECs?
Conversations are the most powerful tool your business has. In a world where buyers expect to be able to connect with businesses instantly, webforms, phone lines with painfully long IVRs and email addresses with 24 hour response times won’t cut it anymore.
With MECs, put conversations back at the heart of your business. And instead of forcing customers down channels they don’t want to use, you can engage your customers on the platforms they use in their everyday lives and deliver exceptional experiences.
“7 out of 10 customers would rather chat with your business on WhatsApp (or any messaging app) than make a voice call.”
With Web1on1 & MECs you can make your business truly conversational and deliver the friction-less experience that today’s customers want.
Here’s how you do it…
How to measure and grow MECs
It’s easier than you think.
Start off by working out the total number of people your business interactions with in a given month. How do you calculate this? Well that’s going to be different for every business of course.
For your dealerships it’d be the total number of service appointments + the total number of sales leads. The number you arrive at is your MEC potential.
Compare that with the number of people you currently engage via your messaging channels and you can quickly see how your current customer communication experience stacks up against what customers actually want.
Customer experience is the new battleground in the automotive industry
Customers now have more information and choice than ever before. And with most products and services gradually becoming a commodity, delivering a superior customer experience is how you’ll set yourself apart. According to our friends at Bain, 80% of companies believe they deliver “super experiences” but only 26% of businesses have a well developed plan in place for improving customer experience.
Delivering conversational experiences and growing your business’ MECs is the competitive advantage that’ll keep you ahead of the game and have your customers loving your brand.
Speak with a conversational expert today and find out how you can introduce conversations into your business to grow your MECs, save money and deliver conversational experiences.
