Customer Loyalty

What is customer loyalty?  Customer loyalty is when enough customers buy from your dealership on a regular basis that you can operate a profitable business today, and plan with confidence on operating a profitable business in the future.

Why is customer loyalty so difficult to attain?  Customer loyalty is difficult to attain because it is sometimes viewed by the dealership and employees as a function of the customer. 

Customer loyalty is never a function of the customer.  The maintenance of customer loyalty is a function of the dealership.  Attaining and maintaining customers who are loyal is a daily duty of every employee at the dealership.

When a customer is viewed by employees as an interruption to their work, a bother to hurry up and get rid of, or someone to act like they care about just long enough to get a sale, that dealership will have a horrendous time finding loyal customers. 

It is both easy and dangerous for a dealership to blame the customer when customer loyalty is not what it should be.  Blaming the customer will never change the way the dealership treats their customers.

As long as we blame our customers, we never have to change anything, we don’t have to grow and we don’t have to get better.  Why, “because it’s not our fault.  It’s the customers fault, when they get better, then we’ll start treating them better.”  That attitude is a recipe for failure, both personally and as a dealership.

The law of attraction says that the kind of customers a dealership attracts is a direct reflection on how the dealership really functions.  Dealerships attract customers who are just like the dealership.  If the employees are kind, honest, diligent, unselfish, and helpful, the customers will reflect those attitudes.  If employees are rude, dishonest, selfish and not helpful, customers will reflect those attitudes also.

The law of the dealership says this:  to the customer, there is no dealership.

There are people who work for the dealership, who the customer enjoys working with, and dealing with every time they visit the dealership.  The customer likes and trusts the people they know at the dealership, and they want to work with those people. 

The first step in attaining customer loyalty is to hire people who are honest, trustworthy, who have character, integrity and love to work with people.  Skipping this step will always prove disastrous.

The second step is to treat those great employees exactly like you expect them to treat their customers.  Good people cost more than average people, but with average employees, you get average customers, and average customers are not usually loyal.

If we hire good people who know how to treat customers, and if we get out of the way and let them treat the customers like they know they should be treated, customer loyalty will take care of itself.  Customer loyalty is not something that we just snap our fingers and get.  Customer loyalty is not something that we just shout orders and give commands for and it suddenly appears.

Customer loyalty, in the final analysis, is nothing more than a reflection of how a dealership treats its employees, what personal standards of behavior are the norm at the dealership, and how the owner and managers treat their own people.  That atmosphere then filters down to the customer, and as a dealership, we get exactly what we give.

Customer loyalty begins with every person employed at the dealership.  We earn the loyalty of our employees with fair, kind, honest treatment.  Our employees earn the loyalty of our customers with fair, kind, honest treatment.  Customer loyalty is always a function of the dealership.

John Brentlinger

Author of The Little Blue Book of Selling