When Dealerware launched our Vehicle Groups and Pricing features in early September, dealers gained the ability to reorganize their fleet in more flexible ways, and to create new revenue streams from fleet operations.
Our webinars introducing the new features aimed to educate Dealerware customers on ways we felt the new features could be most useful. However, we also wanted to learn from our customers what the ability to subdivide fleets and change pricing strategies meant to them.
Right off the bat, attendees from both our webinars agreed that Dealerware’s Vehicle Groups and Pricing features are useful tools for automotive retailers.
Two-thirds of the combined audience across both webinars ranked the new features as “4 – useful” or “5 – very useful” on a scale of 1 to 5.
The remaining third of users were split on the usefulness of Groups & Pricing features, responding that it was either not useful or only somewhat useful at their dealership.
We suspect this relates to these dealers’ ability to charge daily rates for loaner vehicles; a similar proportion of attendees reported policies laid out by their manufacturer, dealer group or dealership restricted them from charging daily rates. Among the rest of the audience, about half are not restricted from charging customers daily rates for loaner vehicles, while a third of respondents were unsure.
That won’t sap dealers’ interest in experimenting with Vehicle Groups, however. Given a choice of multiple types of Vehicle Groups dealers might create with the new features, we asked our webinar audience to choose which ones they would consider implementing at their dealership.
The most popular of the options were Groups that partition vehicles by type (sedan, SUV, etc.), or Groups used to serve VIP customers.
Interest in creating groups for each Service Advisor was also strong, as was interest in creating “Courtesy Upgrade” groups to give customers more choice.
Some dealers indicated they’d create a group just for shuttle vehicles, and others expressed interest in using Groups to specify vehicles for marketing events or test drives.
For most, these experiments may just be getting under way. While about a fifth of respondents said they had already created at least one vehicle group, The Dealerware team was flattered to hear from about half of the combined webinar audience that they hadn’t yet created Vehicle Groups because they were waiting for our introductory webinar.
Our goal is always to help customers get the most from Dealerware, so positive feedback on the value of our webinar series is greatly appreciated.
We get a lot back, too, including excellent ideas from Dealerware customers on what would make Dealerware an even more powerful tool for their dealerships.
During our Vehicle Groups and Pricing webinars, we asked for attendees opinions on whether certain additional features – which were suggested to our team in previous webinars – would enhance the way they use Vehicle Groups and Pricing features.
The clear winner among additional features was the ability to view a daily manifest showing all the day’s scheduled pickups and drop-offs. Close behind in the feature wishlist were per-contract rate overrides in Dealerware Mobile and the ability to create multiple customer agreements for groups of vehicles.
The Dealerware team is always working to improve our products, solve new problems with our customers and create new opportunities to help automotive retailers thrive. We’re pleased to see so many dealerships ready to experiment with new ways to organize and monetize their fleets.
For more ideas on how to use our Vehicle Groups and Pricing features at your dealership, download the Guide to Tiered Loaner Programs.
