Less is More: How Website Overload Sinks Your SalesLess is More: How Website Overload Sinks Your Sales

WASHINGTON – It’s hard to make website usability easy.

That’s a consensus among participants in an Automotive Leadership Roundtable put on here by digital services provider Team Velocity.

David Boice, the company’s founder and CEO, recalls a dealer asking for a digital product that would let customers schedule service appointments in 30 seconds using their phone and a thumb.

“I thought, ‘That should be easy,’” Boice recalls.

It wasn’t. It took months to create.

Building auto-retailing technology that dealer clients request is often hard work, but the payoff is worth it, Boice says.

Best Practices of Websites

A razzle-dazzle website with lots of tools and features may look neat, but it can be a drag.

Too much information on a website comes at a cost of potential sluggishness, says roundtable panelist Lindsay Lee, who oversees Toyota Motor North America’s website operations.

Speed is “huge” for online car shoppers but “too many widgets slow down a website,” she says. “Site speed is what we work on.”

Some of the most progressive dealerships have the slowest websites, Lee says, “because they are trying so many different things.” 

Impediments include an overabundance of screen popups that not only put a drag on the system but can miff digital shoppers who aren’t interested in their content.

Dealer Brian Benstock, vice president and general manager of Paragon Honda and Acura dealerships in Queens, NY, recalls a dubious website that “had popups you could hardly close.” That’s because the x symbols to do so were near-microscopic. 

Too many digital platforms are another potential digital-retailing complication, especially for multi-point dealership groups.

“You don’t want different websites working in different ways,” says Patricia Muyshondt, chief marketing officer at Sames Auto Group based in Laredo, TX. “It’s so inefficient.”

Sames once had 37 widgets on its website. “We narrowed that down, step by step,” Muyshondt says. “We eliminated the widgets that we found weren’t effective. They weren’t converting (leads into sales).”

Toyota’s Lee lists what makes a dealer website effective:

Trust is an important online element, Benstock says. “How do you get trust online? With consistency.”

That means a consistent message and information that does not vary across different websites, such as those maintained by automakers and their dealer groups.

Automaker, Dealer Collaboration

“The future is OEMs and dealers working together to figure this out,” Boice says.

FordDirect is a joint digital effort between Ford and its dealers. “Our job is to fill in the gaps” that sometimes exist between an automaker’s websites and its dealers’ sites, says Ford Direct CEO Dean Stonely. “We operate in the middle.” 

FordDirect’s dealer advisory board offers something of a mantra: Keep it simple. “I’ve never heard a dealer say I want another (digital) dashboard,” Stonely says.

Mutual Benefits

Dealership-related technology should benefit customers and employees alike, say conference panelists.

Modern dealership customers expect the in-store staff to know who they are and what they are interested in online, says Lynne Hudson, marketing manager for Toyota of Tampa Bay and Sun Toyota in Holiday, FL.

That personalization makes for better customer experiences when those shoppers visit the dealership.

Hudson notes that modern dealership management systems contain rich data — such as trade-in and purchase histories — about in-market consumers.

“You have the list in front of you to make the deal,” she says. “Start where they are at. It’s great for the customers, but it’s also easier on salespeople and managers.”

But staffers shouldn’t give the impression of crossing the personal privacy line, Hudson adds.