When Hyundai introduced its Shopper Assurance online initiative last year, an eye-catching element was a 3-day money back guarantee.
But that was revised after some dealers squawked, says Dean Evans, Hyundai Motor America’s chief marketing officer.
“They said, ‘Dean, if we’re going to participate in this, we’re not giving money back like that,’” he tells WardsAuto at a Hyundai media event in Austin, TX.
So, Hyundai changed the program. Instead of the original money-back guarantee, the Shopper Assurance program now offers a “3-day worry-free exchange,” meaning participating dealers will swap out a vehicle, not refund the purchase.
“When we were first putting the program together, some big dealers said we should do money back,” Evans says. “That didn’t go over with a lot of dealers. Now, dealers have the option of giving money back or exchanging a car.”
Another early course correction involved Hyundai, in the name of transparency, pushing back on the way some dealers were posting prices.
“When we started, for 60% of dealers on their website it was, ‘MSRP and call me,’” says Evans, a former dealership general manager. “That doesn’t work for us. It just chases customers to Toyota or Honda.”
Now, posted pricing is MSRP minus rebates and dealer discounts. The dealers decide what sort of discounts they want to give. Transparent pricing is important because “when we do this, it says we’re a brand that’s not playing games,” Evans says.
Shopper Assurance is intended to streamline the purchase by offering a series of digital tools designed to reduce the time it takes to purchase a vehicle.
Among other things, the initiative allows online consumers to review inventory, structure payments, begin the trade-in process, apply for credit and schedule a test drive.
Hyundai went back and forth with some dealers over the automaker prodding its dealers to offer “flexible” test drives at the customer’s preferred time and place.
“That scared retailers at first,” Evans says. “They said, ‘We need our sales team here at the dealership selling cars, not delivering them to somebody’s home for a test drive.’ But in the program’s test phase, that was the biggest ‘wow’ factor.”
Turns out, only about 1% of customers opt for the delivered test-car. Everyone else wants to go to the dealership to see the selection in person, Evans says. “But the point is, we’re doing something modern (with the delivered test-drive offer), getting credit for it in the marketplace and not having to actually perform the service a lot.”
Some dealers feared the generous terms of the test-drive offer would lead to people who aren’t serious shoppers tooling around in demo vehicles. Evans rebuts that. “People who do test drives aren’t interested in joyriding; they want to buy a car.”
Hyundai first launched Shopper Assurance in Miami, Orlando, Dallas and Houston. It went national this year. Of Hyundai’s 820 U.S. dealers, 604 participate in it. A national marketing campaign for it begins this month.
“Some dealers who are not quite into this think it’s a crash to the bottom,” Evans says. Instead, he sees it as a proven way to bring in more gross and profits.
Moreover, it modernizes the car-buying experience, he says at The Thought Leadership Summits’ annual Customer Experience Conference in Los Angeles during a presentation entitled “The Age of CX Finally Arrives in the Auto Industry.”
Evans tells the conference audience, “An auto brand isn’t just about the vehicle. It’s also about the customer experience. If you don’t do that better, you just get in a rat race and in the middle of incentive wars.”
A Shopper Assurance proponent is Andrew DiFeo, who heads Hyundai’s national dealership council and runs a store in St. Augustine, FL.
“Every other industry is upfront with pricing,” he says. “Automotive has to go that way. It will be a standard practice for dealerships who want to compete.”
