Hello and welcome to today's webinar. Our speaker today is Emily Spalla from Satisfye. Before I turn it over to Emily, I'd like to let those of you who are live with us know that you may submit questions during the Q&A tab at the bottom of the screen. This webinar will also be recorded so that you may watch or re-watch on demand at your convenience. With that, I'll turn it over to Emily. Well, thank you for that introduction to get us started. Today, I'm very excited that we are partnering with AED Foundation to present this webinar with you today. For those of you who may not be familiar with myself and Satisfye, I am the Vice President at Satisfye. I have been here for, actually it's my anniversary next week, it'll be 13 years, in various capacities, but mainly I'm working with dealerships like yourselves, helping them really get a better understanding of customer and employee engagement, that faction level, and really helping them grow their business through both their customer and employees. And today, I'm excited to be presenting to you our Customer and Employee Experience Benchmarking data, a report that we released earlier this year. And so I'll kind of get into our agenda here. So we'll go a little bit more in depth about Satisfye, because I just gave you a little introduction to myself and not necessarily who Satisfye is, if you're not familiar. And then from there, we will dive into the benchmark report where we'll give you some highlights. We won't be going through the entire report, but we will give you access to that. And then the next part is, we're gonna talk about real life examples. We just find it really helpful to share experiences that other dealerships and people in maybe your same even roles or capacities have had experiences with. There's never any benefit in reinventing the wheel, as they say. And so how can we learn from what other people have found to be successful, or even those things that have failed and didn't go well, what did they learn from those and share those examples with you. And then to wrap it back up, I'll hand it back over and we'll do a Q&A session. So as you mentioned, we can put any questions into that Q&A spot and we'll have some time saved at the end of today's webinar to answer those questions. So a little bit about Satisfied. For those of you who are not familiar with us, we partner with heavy equipment dealerships as well as manufacturers. And we are focused on helping them, as we say, wow their customers and employees since 1998. So we are in our 25th year of business supporting this industry specifically. So very much a niche player here where we focus on customer and employee engagement specifically for equipment dealerships. And we do this through some of our fully automated and integrated solutions that we have today, allowing you to easily implement solutions to be able to gather feedback from both customers and employees. And so to the right side of the screen, I have a little bit more information around our three different solutions. So the first one is the voice of customer. So as you can imagine, this is how we provide customer feedback back to the dealership or to the manufacturer. And they're able to really grow their business based on meeting customer expectations, getting a better understanding of those expectations, resolving customer issues. And through that process, they're able to continue to evolve their dealerships or even their products. The second solution is our voice of employee. And of course, this has become probably really important. We've had a lot of focus on this solution in the last couple of years, as I think we've all struggled with recruitment and retention of employees. And so our focus is to allow those employees to have a voice and through their feedback, dealerships are able to increase their retention rates. So keep those employees happy, keep them on board longer, get a greater return on their investment, and then also use it to help recruit future employees as well. The third solution we have is our satisfied reviews. So this is really new and up and coming in this industry, but not new to any of us as individuals. So satisfied reviews is a reputation management program. It focuses on taking a proactive approach to managing your reputation. So if you didn't know you had one, you do. Everyone can post a Google review about your business. And so what we're doing is helping dealers really get in front of it, take a more proactive approach, as I mentioned, to getting more reviews, managing the feedback that's coming back in and starting to leverage that to help them grow their business as well. All right, a little bit about us to support the solutions we have in place. I think we attribute most of our success to our partners. Just as we talked about providing a voice to our employees and customers, we do the same here internally at Satisfied. And so it's through our partnerships with these organizations that we are able to provide you with new and up and coming solutions to better meet the challenges that you face today. All right, and then the heart of today's session is gonna be focused in on our customer and employee experience benchmark report. So earlier this year, we hosted our first annual summit in April of 2023, where we released this benchmark report that covers data that was collected through participating organizations that we work with during the 2022 calendar year. And in this report, we'll kind of talk about a little bit of what's included at an overall here level. So it's specific to the industry, and you'll often find maybe some benchmark data if you try and Google it. It'll be very broad, right? Oftentimes we see equipment dealerships focused in with automotive dealerships. This is different. So our benchmarks get down to a very finite level of data. So our industries are, again, focused on heavy equipment, but we can even further delineate those into ag benchmarks versus construction and forestry benchmarks versus trucking. And so it's very much industry specific. So through the thousand plus dealerships that we participate with today across primarily North America, as well as some of our partners that we work with in Australia, we're able to garner a lot of information based on what customer and employee expectations are for these dealerships in the industry and assess what are we seeing, where are the trends, where are things headed, and hopefully give you some information to walk away with from today's session. So this is a little preview of the benchmark report itself. So this is the table of contents for what you will find in the actual report. Again, we're just going to give you a little bit of a sneak peek into the report and our findings at a high level, as well as some key takeaways from what we're seeing and where we think things are headed, along with sharing some real life examples as to what other dealerships are doing to basically get themselves up at the top level of competition or even exceeding that. If you do want to download the entire benchmark report, we have a QR code here. You can see on the right-hand side of my screen. If you are on your desktop, go ahead and grab your mobile device and open up your camera, scan that QR code, and that will provide you the ability to download the full benchmark report. If for any reason, maybe if you're on your mobile device listening to the webinar today, we will email you. My understanding is AED will, after today's session, that will include the presentation recording, as well as the QR code and the link to the benchmark report so you can also download it after today's session. So in this benchmark report, it's going to, of course, give you some high-level information around what we're seeing in the industry, what some of the key performance indicators are, and then it's going to go into three key areas, which again, focus on and align with our three solutions. So the first one that we're going to talk about is the customer experience analysis that was done. What are we seeing as it relates to customer experience benchmark data? What are some key takeaways? And then that benchmark report also will go into the employee experience. It's interesting to see how these things are relative and yet different from one another too, as we look at the employee net promoter scores compared to customer net promoter scores. And then the last area of focus that we'll talk about is online reputation analysis. So that's that reputation management component of it and understanding what are the trends that we're seeing when we look at the benchmark data from 2022. So let's get started. We're going to dive right into customer experience data. So in our benchmark data and report, every year when we take a look at the data from the prior year, what's been collected, it's always really interesting to see what stands out with the data. There's so many different data points that we can look at when we slice and dice the data to see what is really most prevalent year over year, what's new this year compared to last year. Sometimes it's looking at ag versus construction. We've got dealerships now that are combined ag and construction, even some rooftops that are combined. So there's always interesting pieces of data that pop out at us. And the one thing we've noticed over the most recent couple of years is looking at the net promoter score by dealership size. Now, for those of you who may not be familiar with NPS, assume probably most of you are, you know, your OEMs are usually calculating this on your behalf or doing some sort of customer feedback where they're measuring that promoter score. But just to give a little overview, you can always go to our website and get some more in-depth information on it, but it's based on a single question that's asked of your customers of how likely it is that they are to recommend this dealership. From there, the customers are categorized into promoters who respond with a response of a nine or 10, the passive or neutral, which are customers who respond with a seven or eight. And then we have our detractors, which are those customers who respond with a zero to six. And so from that, a score can be derived by taking the percentage of promoters and subtracting the percentage of detractors. And interestingly enough, generally speaking, an NPS score of 50 or above is a good NPS score. Now, that's very broad, but in this industry, we can see the overall average is an 80 NPS, so quite a bit higher than 50. So I think it's really important that dealers are aware of what is the benchmark in our industry, because it is different than just any sort of B2B business, which they say is typically 50 and above. So what we found to be really interesting was looking at our dealerships by size. And so what we have seen is that our smaller dealerships, which we have categorized as being one to five locations, is significantly higher. So they do a much better job of servicing and meeting customer expectations than our midsize and large dealers. Our midsize dealers, we've got classified as six to 19 locations, and our large dealers as 20 plus locations, which has definitely been a shift over time. I remember when I first started working in this industry, we used to say that a large dealership was someone with 10 plus locations, which doesn't really seem to fit the bill anymore now that you guys are continuing to get larger and larger. There's definitely been this trend, which we also found this to be interesting as we just look at what's happening in the industry. A lot of mergers and acquisitions over recent years, I think we don't foresee that changing, that continues to kind of carry across from brand to brand where those dealerships are continuing to grow as well. And so how can you continue to service the customer and meet their expectations as you did when you were a small dealership with one to five locations? I'm sure having a much more intimate relationship with those customers. And as you scale and grow to be a larger dealership where we find that six plus location, there's a decrease there in that promoter score. The one thing that was really interesting though is that our 20 plus location dealerships, while it's relatively same to the midsize and lower than the smaller dealers, is that that group itself, when we isolated it, their MPS score has been increasing year over year. So that gap was wider when we look back further in time between the small dealers and the large dealers, but the large dealers are working hard to close that gap. So what is it that they're doing? Is it processes that they're implementing to try to be more consistent maybe store over store that's allowing them to have those intimate relationships and stay connected and communicate well with their customers just as they did maybe when they were smaller in that one to five group? And looking at the midsize dealers, what do we need to do to make sure that they don't fall behind even further if these large dealers are continuing to get better, right? Any more sophisticated in their processes that are allowing them to make gains when it comes to comparing the net promoter score of small dealers to large dealers. So it was really interesting. Again, I think taking a look at this, this is something we'll keep an eye on year over year as again, trying to keep up with the trends that you have in the industry and where things are headed. I think it's really critical that we keep measuring this data that coincides with what is going on in the industry, what you're doing and what you're focused in on. So if you're sitting here, I want you to think about where am I at? Did I recently go through an acquisition? Are there rumors going around? Are we maybe considering an acquisition at this point in time? Where do I fall in this group? Am I large, midsize, small? And start to think about what is it that you're doing at your dealership or what could you be doing at your dealership maybe differently to help improve your net promoter score? And I wanna say it's always really critical for us that we will give you guys something to walk away with. I'm gonna talk about some key takeaways as it relates to customer experience next. I hope that each one of you will find something that you can take back and share with someone in the organization or a simple thing that you can do that you can take action on within the next week or two, as well as give you some thought to think about what can I do further out? So maybe months ahead, maybe weeks ahead, and that's something today or tomorrow. And I think it's really critical timing. It's August. For a lot of you, your fiscal years end at the end of October. So we're here now in the fourth quarter. A lot of planning tends to happen in August if it is your fiscal year for 2024. And so I think this is really great that you're here and listening to today's conversation and start to think about what it is that you could take away to implement for next year. So as we talk about the importance of having some action items and key takeaways, the first one that I want to talk about is just meeting customers' expectations. So first of all, you're here. That's fantastic. So thank you for showing up and listening. You now are aware, but you may not have been aware before. Sometimes if you are participating in our programs, obviously you get to see the benchmark data. And so you get to get those goals for every year to set towards and work towards. But if you are not in one of our programs, this may be very new to you, and you may not have known where you were at. Maybe you did a quick Google search and saw the 50. And so you thought, oh, great, we've got a score of 60. We're doing well. But looking at this data, that would not be the case. So one, I think just creating some awareness around how can you better meet customer expectations is just understanding what those expectations are. And now you know what they're expecting of your dealership. So that will help you start to get an idea of what maybe some goals should be for future years. Again, whether you're using our program, maybe start to pay attention to your OEM program if you're not yet. But there's a lot of places where you can access this customer data on your own. So start to think about reviews that are being posted when we talk about the reputation management in the future. Start to understand what are my customers saying about me? Those are all good data points that you can start to pull back in to get a better understanding of where things are. The next takeaway that we have for you is focus on the service department. For some of you, this may sound a bit redundant. I'm sure this is not anything new. So I'm not shocking anyone with this information here. So don't lose sight of the service department. Don't let the service department fall to the back burner. This is probably something that you've been focusing on for the last five, 10 years. Long before the great resignation, long before COVID, we've had a focus on the service department as it relates to employee experience. And that's something we'll talk about the employee experience data in the next section here in a minute. There's a lot of theory over and correlation between the customer expectations regarding the service department, as well as employee engagement in the service department. So one of the things we measure, and this wasn't our focus for this year, but you'll see it in the benchmark report when you download it, is we look at customer expectations from the different departments that they interact with in your dealership. So how does parts service that they provide to the customer compare to the service department? And how is my sales team doing? Or if you have a rental department, et cetera, how do those things correlate to one another? And so one thing that has been a trend is obviously the service department scores, oftentimes, not always, but can be lacking in comparison to the other departments within the dealership. And so the service department is complex. It's unique. And it probably requires a lot of your attention already as it is. It's sucking up probably a lot of resources, but I think it's critical. The challenge is not going to be going away as it relates to recruiting and retaining those technicians, but let's continue to focus in on them. I think it's a critical part of the dealership and the experience that your customers have with you. Those interactions that they have with the parts department and the service department over the lifetime ownership of the product is critical and where they go when it comes time to repurchase new equipment and make those recommendations to their friends to get new business coming in the door. So, don't let the service department fall to the back burner. Continue to put that focus on the department as you have been. The third item that I wanted to bring up is process-oriented leadership. So, we are seeing this, and I think this is one of the strengths that we saw come out of our 20-plus locations and how they've been able to keep that trend increasing year over year as it relates to net promoter score, is they have done a really great job of implementing processes that allow them to be consistent in delivering the customer experience from one location to the next. And that's not easy as they get larger and larger, but it is a critical part of the process. So, I think especially if you find yourself in that higher end of the small dealership group or in that midsize group, make sure you are starting to move more towards a process-oriented dealership. It can be hard. There can be a lot of places where to start, and maybe that may seem overwhelming to you in your role, but you have to start somewhere. And so, make sure that you identify maybe what's going to be the easiest place to start so that you can get a win to implement a process where you can drive consistency from one location to the next. Or maybe start where you're going to see your greatest rewards so that you can get buy-in from the rest of the organization to continue to implement processes like the one that you started off with. Those are just two good examples, but I think we'll see some of that in the next section of the presentation today when we talk about real-life examples. But don't let yourself be the ones that fall behind as other dealerships are moving in this direction. So, again, just to kind of keep up with the competition and customer expectations, this is going to be a critical takeaway. So, think about this with your 2024 planning that you're probably in the midst of right now, is what's one thing I can do in my area of responsibility in my dealership to make this change towards a process-oriented organization? And then the last takeaway, as it relates to customer experience specifically, is a full competitive analysis. So, this is great. Like, we're talking about benchmarking data today. Competition has always been something of importance, or at least we've found in this industry. I think it drives a lot of dealerships. And being aware of the competition is one thing. So, again, today, I think just getting an understanding of the benchmark reports is great. I don't foresee that competitive piece going away, whether it was just something that motivated dealerships. I think the industry itself is going to become a bit more competitive from a marketplace and market share standpoint. And so, I think we're going to see that continue to become ever more important, and maybe not necessarily by choices it may have been in the past, but really it's just going to be a natural gravitation and force us into that. And so, continuing to be aware of where you are at is going to be key. So, continue to check in with information from Satisfied, because we're always posting information as it relates to what's going on in the space and benchmarking. Typically, like I said, this benchmark report is released at our annual summit, which is usually in the spring. But there's also other places. Don't overlook maybe what your manufacturers are providing for you, for information as it relates to market share and competitive benchmarking data that may be available. Again, and I'll have a tool for you, too, later in the presentation that will provide you with some local competitive data. And I think that may be really interesting. So, let's make sure we talk about that as well, just to keep you informed and up to date as to where things are headed in the industry. Okay, well, that wraps up the customer experience benchmark data. And to keep going with our conversation, up next is the employee experience analysis. So, very similarly, we survey and collect feedback throughout the year from several dealerships' employees, getting a better understanding of what their expectations are from the relationship and place to work, how engaged they are and satisfied with their employers, what they'd like to see differently. So, these dealerships are doing a really great job of providing a voice to their employees, showing them the importance that they have in the organization, the role they have, and how they can influence the organization. So, when we measure employee engagement, we use the same methodology of the net promoter score that we talked about with customers. And again, employees are saying how likely they are to recommend this dealership as a great place to work. What is different? So, while we're asking a similar question and measuring it the same way, the benchmark data is significantly different. So, this is always something when bringing on a new client who may have experience with customer net promoter score, is the E-NPS, which stands for the employee net promoter score, is significantly different. So, we just talked about customer. We saw that the average was an 80. Now, when we get into employee, generally speaking, having an E-NPS score of anywhere from 5 to 20 is a really great score. So, when getting that score over 20 is fantastic. That's crazy, right? The gap between the two is significantly different. So, keep that in mind. Again, now you're aware of this. So, if you went and measured your employee net promoter score and you came back with potentially a negative number, don't be entirely alarmed. That's not unusual when you're first starting out. That net promoter score, if I didn't mention before, is measured on a scale of negative 100 all the way to a positive 100. It is a huge scale, wide range. And so, just know that you kind of want to hone in on a goal of being somewhere above zero. Positive number is great, but in that 5 to 20 range and anything beyond that is excellent. So, a couple interesting things to note if this is new to you and not something you've done before. And then, the other thing is, again, we did look at some of the similarities with customer and employee because there is a direct correlation there. And on the employee side, when we look at dealerships by size, it was kind of the same thing. So, our small dealerships, again, tend to have pretty intimate relationships with their employees. Oftentimes, we hear and see in the feedback that it's very much run like a family and they feel like a family in that dealership. And so, we tend to see those scores be the ones that are above 20. And so, but the interesting thing, again, these large dealership groups, when we look at the 20 plus locations, we're seeing the net promoter score increase year over year. So, last year's data was even higher than the year prior, which is great because we had really seen, for a very long period of time, employee net promoter score was trending down. And COVID, of course, did not help that. We definitely saw that trend down both on customer and employee side. The customer side definitely made a pick back, picked things back up much sooner and quicker coming out of COVID than we saw on the employee side. And it's interesting because there's definitely been a real shift in the relationship between employer and employee. I think generally speaking, broad, right? Beyond our industry of heavy equipment, but the employees seem to be having a little bit more of more control, maybe more impact, more of a significance on the business itself. And there doesn't seem to quite be that expectation of maybe I should just be grateful that I have this job, but there's more to it. And it's a bit more of a two-way street than sort of a one-way street with the employer to the employee. And so I think it's really interesting, something we're gonna keep an eye on as we move forward. But I've definitely have seen, we've seen a real increase in dealerships wanting to ask for feedback for their employees. And so there's definitely been a lot more dealerships participating in this. Five years ago, there was a lot of fear, I think around leadership in getting feedback from their employees. There seems to be definitely be more openness to that. And I don't know if it's a willingness that they want to get that feedback or the fact that they recognize that they really can't ignore it anymore, that employees feel this way one way or another, it's not gonna go away whether they listen to it or not. And so maybe they should actually take some action and do something with the feedback that's being provided. So again, I think this is something we're gonna continue to see growing. And it's having a significant impact on the dealers that are participating and providing their employees a voice, whether it's something you're doing internally themselves or if they're working with a third party like Satisfied or someone else to administer the program. But just recognizing the fact that employees do have a voice in the dealership and starting to listen to them. So a couple of things that relates to the employee feedback to take away. And we see this commonly in the data. So these key takeaways are all based on, of course, the analysis that was done by our team. These are recommendations often that we provide to the dealers working in the program. So you're getting a little added benefit here to look at this as well. But one of the challenges we find often is that communication is a challenge. It probably isn't necessarily anything that you're going, okay, I haven't heard this before. It's not new to me. But the one thing we're seeing is that leadership communication specifically. Employees feel like it's not very effective and that it could be done better. And so I think part of this is recognizing as I just mentioned, like the one-way, two-way street is that communication is a two-way street. And so I think a lot of dealerships we find get focused in on communicating information down the funnel. So from the top of the organization down to the bottom. And while that can be really important, there's a couple of key pieces in doing it. One is making sure that you are always sort of explaining the why. So let's not lose that. A lot of times we'll say like, this is what's happening. This is when things are happening. But we don't necessarily explain why we're doing what we're doing. And that's a critical piece to the employees in feeling engaged in the business is being able to have that level of understanding and transparency. And when we focus on the two-way component of it is having an outlet for them to provide a voice back whether it's utilizing a system like ourselves or doing something internally where you can provide some active listening measure. So not only letting them know that they have the ability to provide input and feedback to the dealership, but really having a process in place that allows you the ability to listen to the feedback that's being shared. So we need to make sure that we're create that. So again, a takeaway for today would be what are we doing today to listen to our employees? Are we doing anything? Is that working? Are we listening to it? What more could we do to listen to our employees? How can we provide them more ways to provide feedback? How can we be clear and concise with that feedback? How can we encourage the feedback, right? Let them know. And one of the really best, I would say the best way that we've seen to encourage employees to write feedback is to let them know they've been heard. So if they know that someone is actually reading that and is listening to it, they're gonna be more willing to provide feedback again the next time. But when we ask for feedback and we don't listen to it, we are doing way more harm than good. So I will tell anyone on here today, if you are not going to actually listen to the feedback, please do not ask for feedback from your employees. When you are ready, ask for the feedback. Don't go out and do it if your team isn't ready to listen. And you will definitely take yourself backwards and we don't wanna do that. I always discourage anyone from moving forward or participating in our program if they aren't ready to listen and make change based on the feedback. All right, efficient execution. So one of the questions we ask employees is how do they rate the organization's ability to do things efficiently and well? And so this is an area where there's some opportunity for improvement as we have seen in the data. And so oftentimes this step is likely to carry over to your organization as well. When we start to see this information trending from dealership to dealership, it's a common issue that may be more pervasive throughout the industry. So how can you do a better job at executing things well and efficiently? And so I think really having a plan with what you're doing, so setting clear goals and expectations, again, communicating those things and being transparent is really, really key to that process. I think the other thing we see is, we talked about encouraging feedback, but also empowering employees. So what can we do to really make them feel like they have that empowerment? As I said before, I think there's definitely a shift to where generally speaking, culturally here in North America, we're seeing employees, I think, feel more empowered than they ever have before. And that's been a pretty significant shift. I think that will continue as well. But how can you sort of continue to foster that within the dealership? And one of the other things we see sometimes from the feedback is embracing technology. And this is a huge one because there's so much more technology hitting this industry and it seems to be really hard and really fast coming in. And it can be a challenge at times, challenging for staff from all the technology and different solutions that they're having to deal with just to do their job in the dealership, the technology that they're having to explain and train customers on how to use and then getting the customers to also adapt and embrace that. It is coming at us in every which direction. And so what can we do to help our staff sort of embrace that? I think we're all feeling some of the overwhelming burden that comes with new technology coming at us from every which direction. I don't think that's going to change for any of us anytime soon, but it most likely is just going to continue and probably will continue to get faster and faster. So what can we do? Like some of these processes we talk about creating process-oriented organizations. What can we do that highlights how these pieces of technology are helping us in our day to day? Like while it may be difficult during that initial onboarding process as we're learning how to use this new technology, think about what is it going to be like in the long run. Oftentimes it does make our lives easier. It does make things better for us, but it can be really hard to see, right? In the very beginning when we're feeling overwhelmed. And so how can you as a leader help paint that picture for them, help them create a tunnel to where they can see that there's some light there at the end. So again, I think that's a big part of it. We see a lot of feedback from employees as it relates to these things. So I'm sharing these with you. It's probably something that you're feeling in your dealership as well and giving you some ideas as what you can do to take away from today. And we'll talk about a little bit more of this in the real life examples too. The third takeaway when it came to the employee experience benchmark data was employee involvement in decision-making. This probably seems a little bit obvious when we're talking about voice of employee because our program provides dealerships to give a voice to their employees in a system and way to collect that and aggregate it and start to take action on it. But there's more to it than that. And I think this is the only things I want to talk to you about today. Some of the things I want to talk to you about too from a takeaway standpoint. So I think this is a great one. It's really easy to do. So a couple of things is get your team involved. Like if you are an HR person sitting on this call today and you're like, okay, we're asking for feedback. That's great, we're doing this. How can you delegate some of this responsibility? Like it doesn't have to fall all on you. We've seen a lot of success from other dealerships who have implemented like a cross-functional employee engagement team that sort of delegate some of the responsibility down within the organization. And at the same time, what it does is it empowers them as well. So it gets them involved in the decision-making process. It empowers them. And so it hits on so many things at once. So don't feel like you have to take on all that responsibility yourself. How can you start to delegate? And this can relate to other roles and responsibilities outside of HR. I just use that as an example. The other thing is establishing a clear decision-making process, especially when you have more people involved in there. That process is gonna be, it can be more complicated. Again, kind of tying that back to the process oriented. Maybe that would be a good place to start to get something in place is to have a process that allows for delegating, but we have a clear decision-making process and something we can establish across the organization and our multiple locations. And I think the other thing with getting employee involvement in that we have found is even with our process, while it's automated and systematic, it's really important and we tell leadership this all the time is that when you are going back to actually implement the change that you have decided to focus in on for your goals, let's say for 2024, as you are making those plans right now, is that it's really critical that you are continuing to tie back the change that you're making to where it was rooted and established from. So as an example, let's say you did employee feedback throughout the year in 2022, and then for 2023, you had focused on we wanted to improve our communication in the dealership. And so you went forth, you made a plan, and as you're executing it, it may be three, six months later when you actually go to implement this, most of your staff has forgotten, right, where this was rooted from, why you're making this change. To you, you're heavily involved, so you're a part of this process, you know that it came from this employee survey, and it was overwhelmingly the feedback that was provided, but they're not in it day to day like you are. And so they forget, right, we so easily forget these things that happened even just a couple of weeks ago, a month ago, and so three to six months from now, they're not going to remember. So it's really critical, whenever you are implementing these changes, make sure you're communicating back, again, that why component, having that transparency, and they probably need to hear it more than once. So don't forget to leave that out. It's a really key part of the process, again, that will empower them to want to stay engaged and realize that they're actually making a difference in the organization. But so oftentimes, we overlook that why component and bringing things full circle. All right, well, that wraps up the employee section. And next up, we have our benchmarking data for reputation analysis. So again, this is our reputation management solution. This is something that dealers today have not been heavily focused in on, but there is a real shift in this probably in the last two years, where I would say dealerships probably ignored a lot of the feedback that was being provided two to five years ago, it wasn't doing anything about it. But it's getting to the point where we can't ignore this data any longer. And so we'll talk about some key takeaways next. But as we look at how dealers are performing when it comes to reputation management, I will say that the overwhelming majority of you, whether you are actively managing your reputation or not, most of you have a pretty good rating at each of your stores. So again, the Google ratings are location based, that's how Google operates. But we find that most dealerships have a really great rating. And that's probably what most commonly people focus in on, we're all used to seeing the stars. And so everyone kind of wants to know, like when you're looking for a restaurant to go out, how many stars does this restaurant have? So we use this, we're very familiar with the process. From our dealership standpoint, though, we're not heavily focused in on it. But what I will tell you, the one thing that came out of this, we looked at the data is the dealerships who are proactively managing their reputations are doing a much better job than those who are not when it comes to having recent reviews and having a significant enough volume of reviews. So if you are not actively managing your reputation, I ask that you maybe focus less in on your rating that you have. Because like I said, most of the time, you guys are doing a great job when it comes to that. But what you need to focus in on is making sure that you are getting more reviews and having them come in on a regular basis. That's one thing where we're able to help you out with but you can do it manually as well. So these things are equally important when it comes to your SEO ranking. And that that has a significant impact when someone's looking for a dealership like yourself online. And so really, we need to do a better job, I think, as it relates to that. So recency, again, is how old is your most recent review? Volume is the total number of reviews that you have, again, it's at a per store basis. On average, when we look at the benchmark data, you need to have at least 127 reviews or more. Some of you may have that, but maybe not across all of your stores. So start to focus in on getting those coming in on a regular basis. And again, getting that volume up to be over 127 reviews per store. And I think the best way to really understand your reputation is we provide a scorecard report. It's actually free. It's on our website. This QR code on my screen here will take you to our scorecard report. And so if this was the takeaway I was talking about the very beginning of today's session, if you want to see how you're doing today, without participating in any one of our solutions, this is something that will generate a score for you out of zero out of 100 and give you an idea of where you can drive some improvement at the dealership. Go ahead and scan that or again, we'll provide you with this recording and presentation afterwards and you can get the link there, but it is on our website at satisfy.com. So feel free to check that out as well. A couple of key takeaways on the reputation management side is I think the best way ultimately that you can improve your online reputation just ties back to the first part of the conversation, which was relating to customer experience. Because you know, obviously continue to provide excellent customer service means your customers are happy and they're going to provide you with great reviews. I think that's why we do see the average rating for dealerships organically being fairly high, right? I think most of you guys have a dealer, a rating of 4.2 or higher of the benchmark though is a 4.6. So there is room for improvement most likely. But if you are going to hone in on something, I would definitely recommend focusing on getting more reviews than working on the rating component. The second piece is being active with your customers. So again, we talked about not being able to ignore this data. So it's really important. I think most of you are doing this, at least from the dealers I've talked to, but if you're not, please respond to those reviews. Your customers are taking time either to share a concern with you or to speak positively about you. Respond to those and the customers who have something great to say, share it. Share it back within the organization to help boost employee engagement. Share it without the organization, outside of the organization to help you recruit others as well to come into the dealership. But don't overlook that feedback. It can be really useful. So don't ignore it and make sure you're leveraging it beyond just the review that's being posted as well. So the third takeaway is monitoring your reputation. So again, this is really important to keep a close eye on because it can have a significant impact. While we talk about the rating component, this is where I want you to start to focus in on the volume and the recency. So again, if you're going to start monitoring your reputation, start looking at those, run that scorecard report, see where you're at today, compare it to the benchmark report when you download it. That'll provide you with probably some really nice gaps where you have room for improvement. So if you have a goal when it comes to FDO for 2024, this may be a really great way to identify for you what that objective should be and where you should focus in on, like at a location level and the number of reviews or getting a review coming back. Let's start maybe once a month, once a week and go from there throughout the 2024 year. And then the last thing is start to encourage customers to leave reviews. So it can be, like I said, it doesn't have to be automated or sophisticated to get started. You know, it can be a manual process. It can be part of the conversation that you're having. So encourage staff, whether it's like the sales staff, it's the person at the parts counter or the service counter that they're working with, just to simply ask customers to leave a review. You'll be surprised how many people don't think about it, but are willing to do so. It really only takes a minute. And so I think just by you asking, we'll have to start seeing a positive impact when it comes to improving your online reputation. So before we get into Q&A, I've got a couple of things here. Again, if you didn't scan your benchmark report, this is the QR code again here for you to scan to get the download of that. And again, we'll send this out to you afterwards as well. But if you get a chance here to scan that, I'll leave it up for a second. And then we'll talk about a couple of key takeaways before we get into some of the questions. So real-life example, when it comes to customer experience, we talked about the oriented, process-oriented dealerships. One of the things that's an easy way to start off with is organizing customer feedback. So again, you do have customer feedback coming in, don't ignore it. There's the reviews, there's probably your OEM process, there's things that are just being verbally said over the phone to your staff or in person to your staff. So how can we sort of gather that all together and start to organize it better? Some of our dealerships like to categorize their feedback so they understand how they need to workflow or route it within the organization. And again, this could be some of your delegation that we talked about on the last webinar, but again, this could be some of your And again, this could be some of your delegation that we talked about on the employee side and getting them involved is a lot of our dealerships like to have the person that's as close to the customer as possible managing that feedback or responding to it. So delegate that down to the person that actually worked with that customer, but categorize it in a way. So one example is, I think we're all kind of familiar with giving kudos or high fives, liking something on social media, right, promoting it. So are there customers that are sharing feedback that we should be, again, promoting within the organization, like this person that we see individual names called out all the time, that did a great job. So let's make sure we categorize those opportunities where we can recognize that. There's also times where we've got an issue, and we need to follow up with the customer, because we could lose that customer. Again, delegating that down to the person that worked with the customer and making sure they identify that issue, the root cause of it and how they can make it right with the customer. There's other opportunities for maybe we just need to, we don't need to follow up with the customer, but there's something we need to do to fix something. There's action that needs to be taken within a dealership, or maybe there is an opportunity where we just need to share something. I want others to be aware of this, that maybe this happened at this store, it's something likely that could happen in another store, and it's just kind of like a heads up. So those are four great ways to categorize your feedback to help create a process to route it. Like I said, whether it's coming in from reviews or directly to your staff or through your OEM process, start to create a process and start to delegate that down to others within the organization. The other thing is you can prep customers for upcoming feedback. So if you know your OEM is going to be sending out a survey, or again, asking for that Google review, or if you're in working in the satisfied platform, a lot of our dealerships that make the customer aware that there's going to be an opportunity for feedback, have a lot higher participation rates and get better feedback from their customers. So that simple process of just letting them know and communicating it has a really significant impact. So I'd recommend that you do that as well. And the other thing that we've seen successful, a lot of dealerships do this, some may choose not to, but incentives seem to work well. There's usually some sort of compensation plan within the dealership that comprises multiple facets of their responsibilities. One of the things we have seen is involving the customer experience process into their incentive program gets them much more engaged in the process, and they want to do a better job providing a better experience for their customers because it has a direct impact on their lives as well. So those are some couple of real-life examples that dealerships are doing today that you can maybe take away again for the upcoming year as you're planning. On the employee side, we have a couple things here too as well. There's an analysis and benchmarking compensation. A lot of dealers are doing this today. There's companies out there that do it, but it's really helpful to make sure that you are in line with the competition in order to retain staff. The second thing is we have found that a lot of dealerships have overlooked some of the benefits that they provide or don't do a great job of communicating all the benefits and the value of those benefits that are being provided to employees. And the employees sometimes tend to get focused just on the numbers, right? So salary or hourly wages, bonuses, et cetera. And I think tying those benefits back and understanding the value of them and then getting a better assessment as to what benefits are actually being used and valued by the employees is critical because you may be paying for benefits that don't really have that big of an impact, or maybe there's things that employees would like to see differently. So we've had some dealers do this and it's made a pretty significant impact in the value and the engagement with the employees. And the third one is the development of employees. So leadership development programs really is what this boils down to. We're seeing a lot of dealerships either using third parties to do this or actually building them out themselves. But a lot of promotion within the dealerships happens from inside the organization. And to do that successfully, just because you're good tech doesn't necessarily mean you're going to be a good manager, right? So how can we foster that development, let those employees know that there is opportunity to grow within the organization so they're not looking elsewhere shortly after being hired, et cetera. So we've seen this be successful for retention and long-term growth, as well as engagement. So it's been a win-win for the dealership as well as the employees. All right, so what's next? Again, a couple things for you to do as takeaways. We talked about things that you can do immediately, as well as things for future, for planning for 2024. So these are a couple QR codes again. So if you have your smartphones, get those out. If not, we'll get you links to these as well in the file of communication. But the first one is the reputation scorecard. Sorry, that's the second one. That's the one in white here. The first one is the benchmark report. So if you haven't downloaded that yet, do so. If you want to see where you are as it relates to reputation management for each of your stores, scan that QR code and run that report. And then we also put together a blog piece to help you understand how you can set realistic goals for the upcoming year as we get into that planning season right now. So I hope that you all found this to be very useful and have some things that you can take back to your dealership or share with others in your organization that may be able to take some action. And I really appreciate the time today meeting with all of you and AED for supporting us. I'm going to hand this back over. I know we're kind of close on time, but I don't know if there was any key questions that came in that we can address or if we don't have time, I can certainly follow up with you directly after today's call. I think we have a couple minutes for some questions if anybody wants to send in some questions. For dealerships that have not yet implemented a formal customer or employee experience, which is recommended starting point, the customer program or the employee program? That is great. So if I were to recommend something, I would say probably the employee. And the reason why I say that is typically like it starts at home. And so if you have employees that are unhappy and not engaged, the way that you're going to have an impact on both employees and customers would be to start focusing on employee engagement, get them happy and engaged where they're providing better customer experiences, that having the employee voice of employee program and employee engagement boosted is going to automatically roll over to the customer side as well. So I think it's a really great, easy first place to start that's going to actually impact both customer and employee. What does pricing look like for a customer program? And what is the average response rate? Those are great questions. So pricing varies. But if you want to reach out to me directly, I'd be happy to go over that with you. The response rate and participation is a great question. There are so many factors at play. Just to quickly go over those. A lot of it's data quality we find based on the customer information that's available within the dealership, sort of their affinity with your dealership and the brand. But from a customer surveying standpoint, that typically ranges anywhere from like 10 to 40 percent based on how we're communicating with them. On the employee side, again, there's differences here, but that's usually around 80 percent participation. And then I think we have one more. How does your employee engagement program differ from Gallup's? That's a great question. So Gallup has a set a list of questions in which those are included in ours as well. We go in a little bit more in depth on our annual survey asking questions that are very specific to the industry versus just some of those general questions. Our employee feedback process as well often includes additional pulse touch points. Anytime feedback is coming out soon as well. So basically, customer or employees can provide feedback at any time throughout the year. In addition to that in-depth surveying process, you also get competitive benchmarking. Obviously, you can with Gallup as well, but much more specific. So you can see how you're doing related to your specific industry that I talked about with the benchmark report, like ag versus construction and forestry, trucking, etc. So those are kind of broken down into a little bit more in-depth detail. Well, perfect. Thank you. I think those are all the questions. I will be sending out the recording very soon. So thank you all for attending the webinar. Thank you.

webinar

Emily Spalla

customer experience

employee experience

dealerships

customer expectations

employee engagement

Customer and Employee Experience Benchmark Report

net promoter scores

online reputation management