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Great Ideas From The Dealer World to make it through crazy times!

As part of the auto industry, I have been amazed to see how everyone in the space is banning together to help each other figure out how to get through this. We often get the image of "car guys" being cutthroat sharks. I've seen people from all over the industry coming together and talking about how they can help each other. Competitors/rivals giving each other ideas and lifting each other up. It's been great to see.


I’ve been on several calls lately with a bunch of great industry leaders. I thought it would be good to put out there some of the great ideas I have heard about how dealers are getting traffic into the service areas and keeping staff working


Here are a few of the things that other stores are doing:

  • If offering pickup/delivery for service, extending out the distance you would be willing to go out to get a vehicle. May add cost but worth the opportunity to build customer relationships.

  • Offering Service “gift cards” for First Responders. Allowing customers to buy these gift cards to give to First Responders so that they can get their vehicles worked on when Covid-19 has slowed down.

  • Let customers know what you are doing to make sure cars are Covid-19 “safe”, what procedures you are taking when customers bring cars in for service.

  • Looking in CRM/DMS, find customers who have not been in for 6-9 months. Reaching out to them with coupons for service.

  • $10 Oil Changes, give an opportunity to the customer into the store and build customer loyalty.

  • Making sure you clean up your own used inventory and take care of any mechanical issues you can and fix your recalls on your used inventory.

  • Recalls. Get lists from your OEM and reach out to your customers.

  • Recalls. Pull customer info from DMS, on customers not seen in 12-18 months, see if vins have recalls. If you are a CARFAX customer you can use a CSV file with vins to see if they have recalls. Great way to reconnect with customers.

  • MORE Recalls! Connecting with other stores to fix your OEM recalls they have in their used inventory. Shameless plug, our tools at RecallRabbit automate this process. Making it easy for your staff to get these vehicles into your service area.

Feel free to comment if you have any other ideas that people can use. We all need to stick together during these crazy times.