26 May 2021

Lessons are flying thick and fast in the first few weeks after CarShop Express’s new site in Leicester. Manager Michele Williams explains.

Three weeks into business following the opening of the its new Express store in Leicester, CarShop has not only seen higher levels of sales than expected, but has also learned much about changes in customer behaviour. And for branch manager Michele Williams, with some 15 years’ experience with CarShop in a number of different roles, it has reinforced that even a largely online buying journey still needs to be a very personal one.

CarShop Express is very different to the brand’s more traditional used car supermarkets. It covers just 15,000 sq/ft, and has no cars. That hasn’t prevented it selling some 50 vehicles since opening, and sales are ramping up quickly. And with a conversion rate at around 97% – higher than the traditional CarShop’s already impressive 85% – Michele and her team are clearly doing something right.

High early footfall

One of the big surprises is the number of customers who’ve come into the store to talk about a purchase, highlighting that CarShop Express is much more than a ‘click and collect’ facilitator. “I thought it would take longer before we started to see people coming into the store,” said Michele. “After all, we’re a showroom with no cars.

“But about 20% of our business so far has come from people who’ve come in to ask questions about a potential purchase, and we’ve been able to help them browse the CarShop stock and find their ideal car.

“And really, it’s only us who feel there’s something odd in having no cars on display, that there’s something missing. It’s our own perception of what a dealership should be, not that of the customers who are coming in.”

One area where CarShop Express differs to the brand’s supermarkets is that, by virtue of its size, it offers a very intimate experience, and Michele and her team have accentuated this by aiming providing a much more personal service.

“Of course, as a brand, we’re always trying to break the typical perception of what a used car sales environment is going to be like, and the sort of person the customer is expecting to talk to when they come in. Across the brand, our staff are very different – we tend to recruit outside of the industry. We want to be a facilitator for the customer rather than imposing our own ideas.

“But Express takes that to another level. Everything the customer does through the whole journey is with just one person. In the superstores the customer might deal with a consultant and then a business manager and then a handover agent and then perhaps an aftersales contact. At Express, it’s all one person, so we’re offering a really personal service.”

Click and collect, adapted

That level of personal service is not just for the visitors coming into the store; it’s extended to online customers as well. “Over the last 12 months, people have had to do so much more of their shopping online, and in the automotive sector ‘click and collect’ was really important,” said Michele. “What we’ve realised since reopening our stores, though, is that we need to adapt the click and collect process, and at CarShop Express that’s what we’ve done.”

With traditional click and collect, having reserved a vehicle and perhaps received a video of the vehicle, the customer probably wouldn’t hear from the company again until the car was ready for collection. “For me, because I’ve got a smaller site, I’ve got a lot more touchpoints with the customer. So we’ll send a video but we’ll also give the customer the option of a Zoom call, perhaps to reduce the time they need to spend in the store. We’ll send over pictures of the car when it arrives, and customers really like that.

“We try to really build the relationship before the customer comes in,” she continued, “so that by the time we see them they feel that they really know us. But we’re also letting the customer control the journey.”

That promise of more personal service has also extended the reach of CarShop Express well beyond just Leicester. Michele points, for example, to a number of customers who have come in from Birmingham. “I had a lady in the other day who came to us specifically because she didn’t want to experience the traditional sales environment of a big, busy store.

“She’d picked the car she liked, and she wanted to have a one-to-one interaction with us and then go off and enjoy the rest of her Saturday. So she was happy to travel a bit further to come to us.

“We’re not deliberately trying to pull people away from another store in our marketing, but rather to say that this is something different that you might want to travel for.”

Test drive surprise

Another surprise for Michele is finding that requirements for test drives are significantly reduced after lockdown. “Historically it was very rare to have a customer who didn’t want to take a test drive before buying – probably fewer than 10%. But in Express, 40% of customers have bought their car without a test drive.

“Part of that comes from the fact that we’re offering a 14-day refund policy to take the hassle out of buying, but you can also see that, having been forced by lockdown into online journeys, confidence in buying online has grown.”

The new Express store is already much more than CarShop had perhaps expected, and is identifying changes in customer behaviour that are seeing conversations about how the brand’s more traditional supermarkets might want to adapt. The pandemic and the lockdown period have changed much within the industry, and CarShop Express demonstrates many reasons for optimism.

Tags: Carshop, CarShop Express, case study