It’s no secret that in order to do well in any industry, you have to know your customers. In fact, businesses that take customer-centric approaches are 60% more profitable than companies that don’t focus on their customers.1
Yet beyond increasing your revenue, providing a good experience for your customers is indispensable in today’s market. With abandonment rates steadily climbing and digital natives dominating the workforce, keeping up with consumer trends to wire your CX (customer experience) accordingly is not an added bonus, but essential to the survival and success of your dealership.
To stay ahead of the competition, it’s no longer enough to have a good in-store experience. You need to provide customers a connected journey that seamlessly integrates in-store and online, offers flexibility, and allows self-actioning.
Although abandonment rates and digital natives may appear to have no connection, these two concepts are more entwined than most people realize. By definition, bounce rate is the percentage of visitors leaving a website after viewing just one page. It indicates how frequently users visit your website without further interaction or exploration.2 In direct correlation, an abandonment rate is the percentage of shopping carts that are abandoned prior to the completion of a purchase.3 But what do either of these definition have to do with your dealership and why should you care?
Both bounce rates and abandonment rates have seen notable growth in recent years. However, while identifying the upward trend is important, the key thing we must realize is that it is no coincidence that their rapid uprise happens to be at the same time digital natives have become the leading majority of the workforce.
Here’s how the two are linked. A digital native is a person born or brought up during the age of digital technology (post-1980). Individuals that think and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors, as “native speakers” of the digital language.4
Essentially, that’s a nice way of saying we’re familiar with technology, our attention spans are short, we know what we want, and when we have a website experience that is slow, unclear, or frustrating—we won’t wait around.
The increase in bounce and abandonment rates is not a rough patch you can simply ride out. We’re faced with a fundamental shift in expectations and the way business is done. Your online experience is either helping you or greatly hurting you—setting you apart from the competition, or offering yet another frustrating, fragmented journey.
You may think your website is clean and generally offers a frustration-free experience. However, today’s consumers have expectations for technology unlike ever before. Rather than seeing great customer satisfaction amidst the rapid advancement, research shows that two out of every five website visits (39.6%) are still impacted by frustration.5
Online environments, digital tools, and platforms are now second nature to us. As a result, factors that we wouldn’t have noticed a decade ago are driving customers to your competition today. Slow responses, fragmented, impersonal journeys, and limited self-actioning will frustrate your buyers and push them from your website.
While there has been an obvious shift in consumer trends in areas like entertainment, with smartphones, streaming services, social media and so much more, there are many areas where consumer patterns are often overlooked.
The majority of consumers are now not only familiar, but many often prefer online shopping. From research, price comparison, even up to the actual purchase—recent studies have shown that openness to large online purchases is growing at a rapid rate. In fact, Americans are more open than ever before to purchasing expensive items such as homes, vehicles, and major appliances online.6
While face-to-face interaction still provides great value, today’s consumer is concerned with convenience, speed, and flexibility like never before. Does this mean dealership visits will come to a screeching halt—absolutely not. However, it does mean that if you don’t offer seamless communication before they come into the dealership, they won’t come in at all.
Studies show that people want to communicate with business the same way they do with their family and friends—via text. But more than just a faster, easier way to communicate, 63% of consumers say that businesses that text them provide them with a better overall customer experience.7
It’s not about being tech-savvy or pushing everything online, but rather realizing that as consumer preferences change—we must adapt. A great dealership experience seamlessly integrates the in-person and online experience as one. It provides customers everything they need to make an informed decision, limits the frustration factors, and makes buying a unit as effortless as possible.
Today’s consumers look at your website in an entirely different way than you do. From your perspective, you may have had a busy day at the dealership. However from their view, your slow response was taken as the unit is not available, or you’re not interested. While this isn’t meant to overwhelm you, it is meant to help you realize—even the most efficient teams need tools to maximize operational efficiency, provide a seamless CX, and increase conversions.
As bounce rates and abandonment rates climb, it is important to ask yourself—What online experience do we offer? Can we improve the buying journey to reduce frustration factors? What are our follow-up and response rates, what does our lending experience look like, and how can we optimize customer experience and engagement?
It’s not by chance that 84% of companies working to improve their customer experience report an increase in their revenue.8 Yet, no matter how good your experience is in person, the reality is that experience begins online. Almost all consumers begin research online and the experience you provide on your website will be the difference between next steps or choosing to go with your competitor.
Today more than ever before, it is vital to offer a connected online experience. As digital natives continue to dominate the workforce, technology adoption continues to increase, and the standard for what constitutes a frustration-free experience is set at a high bar—the experience you offer is critical to your ability to gain market share.
Connected Commerce is the experience you need to stay ahead in today’s market. With a seamless journey, in-store and online, this is the answer to what consumers are looking for. Transax is built to capture customers and enable each step of their buying journey to be clear, connected, and effortless. For dealers, it’s built to utilize intelligence to drive performance, which means you can stop wasting time on deals that don’t matter and save time on the deals that do.
With easy setup and iPhone and Android apps, Transax works with your existing website and makes connected commerce affordable and practical for you. If you want to learn more, schedule a 20-minute demo and talk with one of our digital retail specialists HERE.
Messaging Digital Retail Customer Engagement Connected Commerce
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1Source: 50 Stats That Prove The Value Of Customer Experience, Forbes, 2021
2Source: Understanding Bounce Rate, The Smarketers, 2024
3 Source: Shopping Cart Abandonment Rate, Lido
4 Source: Digital Natives, American Library Association
5 Source: 2024 Digital Experience Benchmarks, Contentsquare, 2024
6 Source: New Study: Online Purchasing Stigmas Are Waning, adtaxi, 2024
7 Source: Texting & SMS marketing statistics in 2024, Simple Texting, 2024
8 Source: How (And Why) To Cultivate Customer Experience Perfectionism, Forbes, 2022
