One of our clients asked us measure the length of time a customer must wait for a response to a sales inquire via email.

Over a 6 month period, dealerships were sent a sales lead once or twice per month and the length of time to respond was recorded. Of course it is always subjective as to how quick, is quick enough, but our client used 5 hours as being an "OK" response time.

Initially, less than 25% of the dealers were responding within 5 hours and less than 45% even responded at all.

Feedback was conducted in a variety of ways including the information being viewable on one of our web sites, communications with dealership management and visits to some of the dealerships.

Within 6 months the "OK" responses (within 5 hours) had more than doubled to over 50% and those that responded at all increased to near 80%.

At the beginning and end of the 6 month period, a benchmark comparison was made with other competitive dealers and while the overall performance at the beginning was about the same the dealers we worked with were far ahead of the comparison dealers who did not improve at all.

The significant improvement has pushed this manufacturer's dealers far ahead of the competition.

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