Sonic Automotive Shakes Up the Customer Experience with New Sales Approach

Sonic Automotive, one of the largest automotive dealers in the US, has shown they are dedicated to improving the customer experience of buying a car.

For the past 7 years, they have undergone a process to analyze their sales approach that has yielded significant customer insights. These insights are being turned into actions that will dramatically change the customers’ journey the moment they step in the door. 

Loyalty360 CEO Mark Johnson sat down with Doug Bryant, Vice President of Talent Management at Sonic Automotive to get the scoop on how they are changing the car sales process and what this means for their customers.

Building a unique concept

Bryant: Through our extensive customer research, we learned how customers want to buy a car. For example, they just want to deal with one person during the transaction. That’s one primary insight we used to change the sales process. Now the sales people do appraisals, F & I, finance, and all the paperwork for transactions. We sped up the transaction time with the proprietary technology; now after they pick a car, we can have them in and out within an hour.

We don’t want to spend 3 or 4 hours and have customers be exhausted by the car-buying experience.  That was the one of the major pain points we eliminated; it took so long, and it was something customers wanted to be excited about, but at the end of process they weren’t.

Starting with Employees

Bryant: The plan was to put associates first. When we started building this business model, we went out and benchmarked who we thought had the best benefits, work-life balance, hours, etc. Like Ritz Carlton, Nordstrom’s, Starbucks, Zappos. We picked out from each what we thought were the best practices. We put that in our overall employment brand – we said that is what is going to allow us to attract really good talent, and retain that talent.

Implementing the New Customer Experience

Bryant: We need to educate our customers when they come in on the buying process with us. We aren’t taking them through linear process; it’s more circular. The guests comes in, they meet a salesperson who is a “guest experience guide.” The guide shows them on the iPad all the options they have – they can look at inventory, appraise a car, talk about financing options, and see what they can afford. We give a lot of options upfront so it doesn’t feel like we are wasting their time. This is putting the consumer in charge of the whole process.

In addition, we aren’t putting our service department way in the back of the dealership where no one can see it. It has a presence upfront, as much so as the showroom. There are lots of glass walls so you can see right into our service facilities. There is even an area for kids to ask technicians questions - what are you doing, what is that? The techs even have microphones to talk to kids.  So it’s more interactive.

Measuring Efficacy with Data and Analytics

Bryant: On the employee side we are focused on total employee satisfaction and engagement. We are turning the old HR practices upside down, because we don’t think tools such as a traditional once-a-year survey were effective enough for us. We are doing more of a pulse survey on a weekly basis for real-time data and we are using new mobile technology to do that. Weekly we will send out texts to associates with some simple questions, which will give managers a pulse check on engagement level of our associates. We aren’t waiting on annual cycle to do that.

We are really diving in deep on analytics, looking at the correlation between employee engagement and customer satisfaction, down to an individual level. We will be able to see how engaged individuals are because they will tell us, and we then will look at productivity and CSI scores for that week. Analytics is part of our business and our process moving forward.

Biggest Challenge (CMO Challenge)

From my perspective as VP Talent, the biggest challenge is finding the right talent out there. We don’t have a presence in the marketplace right now; we are an unknown. We have to get people to come and sell used cars, which can often means a leap of faith initially on their part for us to get top talent to come to us. Overtime, once we get our first set of stores and marketing in place, it will be much easier. Right now we are heavily screening to get top talent and plan on huge growth. We want to fuel our other markets with talent from original markets. 

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