NEW ORLEANS — The reality of disruption is consumer education, said John Garff, president of Ken Garff Automotive.
“People are coming in and they’re more educated than our salespeople are,” Garff said at the American Financial Services Association’s 2017 Vehicle Finance Conference yesterday. “They’ve already spec’d out the car, and they know about it inside and out. People know more about the car than any of us, and we’re supposed to be selling it. So that’s just the reality of disruption.”
The amount of information available to consumers online now has forced dealers to figure out how they can provide, not just more information, but better information, he added.
“They want transparency — which builds trust — they want information that’s germane and important to them,” Garff said. “Anything that helps the customer understand the process, even simple calculators, and selecting their own payments. We did those things back in the day, but now we have to connect it to credit scores and just have it be more specific to their needs.”
Consumers are not “one size fits all,” Mark Kaczynski, president and chief executive at Nissan Motor Acceptance Corp., added.
“Everyone wants something different,” he said. “They [may] want to have a call at whatever time, they may want to respond by voice or they want to have a text. They might want email or they might want paper communication, so you’ve really got to support all channels of communication.”
Millennials — a main topic of conversation at the conference yesterday — particularly like to be viewed as unique, Kaczynski said.
“They don’t view themselves as millennials, they view themselves as individuals — but we try to put everybody in a box,” he said. “The reality is we have to look at them as individuals and figure out how do they want to be dealt with.”
