17 November 2014

Publication of our annual Website Report (launched at our Digital Landscape conference on Friday) is always a tense moment.

By and large we try to avoid judging the industry, giving out awards or generally telling you how to do your job. We take the general view that you’re the experts and we’re here to observe and report.

The Website Report breaks that rule. It’s the only time when we sit down, analyse what’s going on and pass judgement. I have every confidence in our research (and our editor, Steve Johnson) but I wouldn’t be human if I didn’t have that slight nagging doubt: have we got this right?

This year we invested more time and energy working with our colleagues at Mediahawk to track out-of-hours response rates. That is, how well and how fast do auto retailers respond to an e-mail enquiry after 7pm on a weekday.

Quite frankly, the results were shocking. Only six out of 54 new car retailers tested got back to us the same evening – and we’re still waiting to hear from 16 of you. That means 30% of the industry can’t be bothered to respond to a sales lead (and the results were even worse in the used car supermarket sector).

Meanwhile, those people who are good at it (and some are very good) have contacted the potential customer, found them a car, made an appointment and taken them out of the market. Almost a third of you might as well not bother.

Controversial stuff. So I was nervous – and I take no pleasure (though some relief) at having our results confirmed. Mystery shopping by AutoTrader (also revealed at the Digital Landscape conference) found around 50% of the industry never respond to an email enquiry and only 38% got back within four hours. That’s half the sales leads, thrown away.

I’m still not in the business of telling you how to do your job. But we’ll be doing the same exercise again in a year’s time and I really hope the results will have improved. It’s one of the reasons why we do publish the Website Report – to make sure we all get better.

Rupert Saunders

Tags: Auto Retail 2014 Website Report, our blog, out-of-hours response