Challenge
Buckeye Honda realized that consumers’ shopping behaviors were shifting rapidly in 2020 with a primary focus on starting the car-buying process online. To accommodate this shift and meet consumers’ new expectations, Buckeye Honda was looking for a solution that could quickly and easily synchronize their online to in-store process to create a seamless car-buying experience.
Solution
Buckeye Honda selected Upstart Auto Retail to create a streamlined and user-friendly experience for both their customers and sales teams. They wanted a simple and intuitive way to align and connect what customers were doing online to their in-store experience.
What I love the most about Upstart Auto Retail is that it’s a combination of a high-quality digital retail tool with an in-store app that streamlines the process for both customers and sales—making it a game changer. It’s a customer experience tool, a retention tool, and a profit generator all wrapped up into one solution.
Results
18.1%
increase in close rates
95.21%
increase in internet sales leads
25%
TVG average increase
50%
reduction in sales team turnover
Faster training and onboarding
After initial implementation, Buckeye Honda was able to get their sales teams to fully adopt the tool within a week and they were up and running within a month.
The ease and simplicity of the tool has also had a positive impact on retention for the dealership, decreasing their sales team associate turnover rate by 50%.*
Our sales team felt comfortable with the tool almost instantly, and they were confident in all the “ins and outs” with in a month of applying it to their sales process. This is critically important because when people are new, it helps them feel confident that they can close deals without missing any steps.” With Upstart Auto Retail, Buckeye Honda has been able to increase close rates by 18.18%.*
We realized that we were often duplicating efforts and leads. What made things even more time consuming was manually re-entering data and transferring information from online leads into our CRM system. With Upstart Auto Retail, things are faster on both sides—sales can focus on more opportunities and customers don’t have to spend too much time on the lot. We’re able to complete the entire process in one place—data in put, desking, offer, acceptance, and more. Now when customers complete certain steps online, we have everything visible and we can instantly pull up their information when they show up at the store.
More efficiency and smoother operations
Not only was the traditional way of selling cars from searching for vehicles manually to printing documents time consuming and lengthy, but keeping track of all the steps and inputs was creating friction in the sales process. Buckeye Honda was seeing that when customers would come into the showroom, they often had to restart the process, which greatly reduced efficiency.
More engaging customer experience
By having complete customer information in one place, Buckeye Honda was able to create a consistent experience that built confidence and trust in their customers. Thomas states, “The process customers see online is the same thing they see on the iPad when they come to the showroom. Having desking built into one tool makes it easy for a salesperson to request and generate an offer for a customer, which greatly streamlines communication across our teams.
With Upstart Auto Retail, we’re able to include our Buckeye protection package right in the tool, showing videos and direct examples of what’s featured in the brochure in an iPad-friendly format. Having the protection plan be part of the iPad experience makes everything feel connected for the customer.
One of our value statements is trust, we want to be transparent with our customers and show them what their options are, what they’re getting, and how much they’re going to pay for it. Upstart Auto Retail helps us stay true to our core values and beliefs as an organization. The tool makes everything completely transparent, making customers feel more included in the process, which often leads to more profitable deals.
Full transparency
Having everything upfront and transparent allows Buckeye Honda to live up to their mission and stay aligned with their values. Buckeye has realized an average increase of total vehicle gross by 25% with Upstart Auto Retail.*
Enhanced implementation and support
Buckeye Honda has been extremely happy with the implementation process and ongoing support they’ve received from Upstart Auto Retail.
It has been the easiest implementation process of technology I’ve ever experienced. The tool was built in a way to make it easy for people to pick it up and use it intuitively. And the support team is absolutely stellar. Not only do they work to fix issues quickly, but I like that we’re able to work with one person directly on the support side, rather than being shuffled around to different people, which makes it much easier to build trust in the team and the company as a whole.
*The findings reported in this case study are based on information collected by Buckeye Honda and reported to Upstart Auto Retail. These findings illustrate a comparison of data from Jan. ‘20 – May ‘20 vs. Jan. ‘21 – May ‘21
Download the full Buckeye Honda case study
