Microsoft Lumia 950 smartphone, Photo supplied by Microsoft News Center, 2015.
When it comes to smartphones, there are two types of phones and two types of phone users.
The first is the simple phone, the one that fits in your hand and lets you make phone calls, answer a quick email and sent quick texts. It fits nicely in you jacket pocket or bag.
Then there is the phablet. The phablet is a phone with a screen that is 5.5 inches or more in size. It is big and a powerhouse. Think of it as a small computer. People who use phablets are the power-users of the smartphone world. They not only make phone calls and text, they do serious work on them, from presentations and business plans using Microsoft business apps, or reading newspapers and streaming content. The screens are often HD quality or better.
So why am I talking about the phablet? A recent J.D. Power study finds consumers showed the satisfaction with OEM and third-party automotive websites was highest across all parts of the online experience with users of phablets. To summarize the key findings of the J.D Power 2015 Automotive Mobile Site Study, people shopping for new vehicle reported higher satisfaction with their online experience of going to a vehicle’s manufacturer’s website or at third-party website about the vehicle a consumer is interested on their phablets than they were if they had to use a smartphone with a smaller screen. The larger screen facilitated the use of interactive content such as video, for example, than if they had to use that content through a smaller screen
Here was a particularly interesting finding:
“There is a substantial difference in advocacy and loyalty rates between vehicle shoppers who are highly satisfied (overall satisfaction scores of 901 and above) with their shopping experience on a third-party website and those with low satisfaction (scores of 500 and below). While 81 percent of highly satisfied shoppers say they “definitely will” recommend the website to friends or family, just 3 percent of those with low satisfaction say the same. Additionally, 82 percent of highly satisfied shoppers say they “definitely will” return to the website vs. just 5 percent of those with low satisfaction.”
So what does this mean for independent service operations? With a growing number of people conducting both their daily and business lives through smartphone technologies, and with a growing consumer acceptance of using these larger phablet devices, an independent service operation’s website is going to have to be a lot better than it is right now. Too many service operation websites are, well, rather dull. Just a couple of photos, an address and some boilerplate about how good the operation is. There are no videos, no information answering common automotive issues many have or a way for the customer to reach out to the staff, except through a phone call. Worse, many of the websites are not optimized for mobile devices. When the website is called up, the menus often don’t work or the site simply looks terrible on a smartphone, regardless of the screen size.
I’ve written before to how common it is becoming for today’s vehicle owner to go online to research service operations. Those searches weigh heavily in the final decision on which service operation is going to get a person’s business. What the J.D. Power study shows is that how well a business presents itself online and how well the website looks and what it offers to people, plays a big role in developing brand loyalty and the promotion of the services and goods a business offers. If your site looks terrible on larger screens, is hard to use or it is just dull, you are sending out a message that your service operation is the same.
Canadian Automotive Professional 