Why giving customers their privacy can boost returns

There are very few customers totally happy talking about methods of payment and their general finances in the open environment of a showroom.

During my divorce (the current Mrs Tong doesn’t read my articles so I’m pretty safe with that statement) I was interviewed by the legal beagles for the sole purpose of quantifying my worth, and what an unhappy experience it was. The meeting took place in an environment I wasn’t familiar with, and I had my back turned to the main office space, with all their bewigged buddies behind me chatting and laughing.

The discomfort I was made to feel by this experience was palpable and had a major effect on how and what I shared with those lovely gentlemen. I very quickly transferred the feelings from that event to my working environment as a split site retail business manager for Volkswagen Audi and Renault, and the effects were pretty incredible.

Without changing a single pitch, product or price my profitability went up, simply because my customers felt they had a level of privacy and a feeling of security that enabled them to relax and tell me what I needed to know, to ultimately identify and close the right F&I product for their needs.

The selling environment

Most automotive retail environments can accommodate this basic requirement, but as professionals we still miss a golden opportunity to sell against our main threats, and constantly fail to reinforce the key features of our paper products over and above those of our major competitors. We know that our processes are covered by the Data Protection Act, and that data integrity and protection is high on the radar for our customers, but we don’t tell our customers that, why not?

We know that our main F&I sales processes are heavily and professionally regulated by the FCA, but we don’t sell that as a positive to our customers, why not? We also know that our funders would never sell private and confidential customer data to their competitors, but we don’t discuss this with our customers, why not?

In fact, there is much our paper offers our customers that we don’t discuss with them, so if we don’t tell them, how can they ever be a part of their decision-making process?

By Andy Tong, managing director, Profit Training

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