The Exciting Dealership Benefits of the New Harley-Davidson Partnership with Kenect

Mar 22
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9
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Dealer Webinar

[Webinar Transcript Feb. 2022]

Mike Melis:

Welcome everyone. Let's go ahead and get started. Dan, welcome.

Dan Major:

All right. Thanks buddy. Hello everybody, this is Dan Major, I'm the project manager for the Dealer Digital Program here with the team from Kenect. I think that everybody is here because you've seen the communication that's gone out to share with you that we have integrated with a new provider Kenect. This is a current provider to many of our dealerships roughly 100 in the U.S. Harley-Davidson dealerships are using Kenect.

I'm excited to have them integrated as another provider to consolidate all of the tools that you are using from your website to any addons that you have that help you to better serve your customers. I know we have a mix. Just everybody. Mike's going to give us a deeper dive into any of the communications that came out. He's going to give us a much deeper dive into the specifics of the services that Kenect offers. So with that, I'll hand it over to you, Mike. Thank you.

Mike Melis:

I appreciate it. Thank you so much, Dan. We are excited about today's webinar. As Dan mentioned, we have about a 100 dealers already using Kenect before even being included in the Dealer Digital Program that are enjoying Kenect using it in their day to day workings of their dealership. But as we mentioned, we're going to jump in today and kind of walk you through why it is that other dealers are using Kenect and how it all works.

Just a couple of points as we get started here, you are all in listen only mode. So there is the capability to leave questions in that panel, that GoTo Webinar panel over the right. So feel free to drop questions in. We will save some time at the end to walk through those questions. So sit tight. We're going to try to keep this to about a half an hour total. So we'll try to keep the presentation here to about 25 minutes. We'll leave about five minutes at the end for some question and answer, but feel free to drop those questions over in the right. So let's jump in.

Who is Kenect?

My name is Mike Melis, I'm the head of partnerships here at Kenect. And we're excited to talk to you all today about connecting who we are. And we are a text messaging platform that's specific to dealers throughout North America. As I mentioned, we have about a 100 Harley dealers using Kenect. We have thousands of dealers across the North America using our system, but our tools really designed to help dealerships communicate more efficiently, generate new leads, collect payments via a text message which is really simple and easy, drive online reviews like you see in the bottom right hand corner of the screen there, and also chat with live video, right from a text message.

So all of those things are kind of built on top of our platform which is already built. Our system was designed and built by guys who ran dealerships on their own. And they knew and felt the pain and some of the challenges of running a dealership. And so that's really kind of know who we are and where we came from. We're proud to have been named recently to Inc. 5000 list as the 25th fastest growing software company in America and the 216th fastest growing company in America overall.

So we're seeing tons of dealers out there finding value in our product. It's making communication better with their customer and we're seeing a ton of growth from that. We are also deeply integrated with a lot of the industry software. Other systems that you may be using, we are integrated with those systems as well. As I mentioned, we have about 5,000 dealers across North America, about 50,000 users across all those dealerships using Kenect on a daily basis. And we're tied in with all the platforms that you see right here.

As I mentioned, we've got dealers throughout North America using our product. You may have a friend or two on the list there that is using Kenect today. We hear some pretty consistent themes. As we work with all those dealers out there in the world, we hear some pretty consistent things across the board, the challenges that they face and it's everything from during the busy season, your phone's ringing off the hook.

Lots of you ask a lot of similar questions. Service base can be held up by that back and forth with customers trying to get approval on those repairs and things of that nature. Lots of phone calls, lots of phone tag, it's competitive out there. It's highly competitive. Sometimes it's hard to differentiate. I've never met a dealer who said they have enough leads. So never enough leads and those are all challenges that we really want to help you face. We want to help you handle. And the way we do that is a couple of things and we chatted with about these a little bit. So Kenect provides a two-way text messaging solution right from your dealership phone number. So some dealers have tried texting and they may have different members of their team texting but it's oftentimes through their personal number and that's not what we're advocating. We're advocating we will actually convert your main dealership number into a textable number. So you can text customers from that number they can text you on that number as well.

Web leads right from your website. We'll talk about this in a moment. We actually have help you capture web leads right from your website because now your customers and new perspective customers can text with you right from your website. Collecting payments right from a text message which is really easy and a online review generation. And a couple, if you haven't thought about text messaging in the past, there's a couple interesting things that you should think about here.

You're probably all sitting there with your phone either in your pocket or on your desk there as you watch this webinar and you probably have a few unread emails, but you probably have very few unread text messages if any. We read our text messages. 89% of consumers, Pew Research did this study and they found that 89% of customers would prefer to interact with the business over text versus a phone call. 98% of text messages are opened and 95% are red within three minutes. If someone texts you right now on this webinar, you would probably read that text message. That might not be the same case with an email. You're highly unlikely to take a phone call. They can be disruptive. When you're in a meeting doing something like this, it's hard to pick up that phone. Your customers are the same which can lead to a lot of that phone tag back and forth. And here's a few of the top ways that we see Harley dealers right now using Kenect. Everything from scheduling appointments, setting reminders, you can send quick info like, hey, your bike is ready for pickup or someone asks hours or map to your location, you can easily use templated messages to respond to things like that. It's great for sending targeted warranty reminders or maintenance notices.

As I mentioned, you can collect a payment from a text message. So if somebody wants a special order report or they want to pay for their parts or service right over a text message, you can easily do that. Collect a deposit on a bike. It's great for video chat, awesome in parts and service, they can actually, right from a text message, start a video chat, show a customer exactly the issue it is that you're addressing on their bike. They can see it. You can talk through it. They can then send confirmation that they're okay to move forward with that repair.

You can send almost anything from a text message. Videos, PDFs, attachments, documents are all easily sent right from a text message and they're going to be read. And it's great for generating online reviews which are critical to a dealer success nowadays. People want to validate you before walking in the door. There really easy to generate those reviews through using text messaging. And it's a great way to capture more leads from Facebook, Instagram, and your website. We'll talk through all those in a little more detail here. But Facebook and Instagram have about a billion active users on their platform. We are integrated with those solutions as well. So your messages, whether they're text messages or you've got as you can see here, your presence out on Facebook and Instagram and their messenger tool, those messages flow into our system as well. Now they also added a way to allow you to put your number in there to text you.

You can post that. You can put your Kenect text message number in that as well, allow people to text you right from there. And as in mentioned, Kenect's a great way to actually capture leads from your website. A lot of people will get to your website you spend a lot of time and effort and money trying to get people to visit your website. And sometimes they get there and they never engage.

As you can see here, this dealer has a “text us” button on the bottom of their website, and it's a great way. It's just another familiar way for people to reach out and engage with you. And when dealers add that to their website, what we see is a pretty dramatic increase in the number of leads that they're actually capturing. So you can see here in September, they added the widget and they've seen a significant increase in the number of leads that they're actually capturing because when they go there, this is what that customer sees. They click that “text us” button and you can configure this with whatever departments you'd like here, but let's just say they want to reach out to your sales team here. They click that “text us” button, they click sales, they enter a name, a mobile number and a message, that's “hey, I'm interested in bike X,” or “I'd love to talk to you about this particular part.” Whatever the issue is that they need help with. When they do that, they get a really nice automated message back that says, hey, thanks for reaching out. We'll respond to you shortly. And now you're texting them just as they normally would on their phone. So they're transitioned right to their phone. So it's not like chat. They're not suck in front of a website or in front of that website on their phone, they're just going about their day. They're getting messages back and forth from you. And this is what it looks on your side. You've got a really nice inbox and you can think about this as your texting inbox. So everybody in the office there has an email inbox. This is your text message inbox.

So if I'm John, I'm a sales guy, all the messages that come into the sales team flow directly into me. And by the way, that was a text message that just came through from my wife. But all my messages flow right into my inbox here. And or if I'm the sale or if I'm from service department, they come into me, they're routed intelligently to the right folks in the team depending on where that customer needs help. And you've got the same functionality on the mobile application as well.

So if you're out and about you're on the floor with a customer, you're not sitting at your desk, you're talking to customers, you still have all that same functionality just in a mobile form as well. So you can see all your messages get really nice notification. It's available on both Apple and Android phones for download, but you have really nice tools that are part of that. Whether you are using kind of the desktop version of this which is accessible on any computer that has an internet connection or you're accessing it on the mobile app, you have really nice tools.

The messages you say over and over again, those are quick reply templates. You can just easily template things that you want to not have to type over and over. You can easily click and send, pick a template and send it back like your address or things of that nature. You could ask for a review. You have great interaction with a customer. “Hey, would you leave a review for us? I'm going to send you a quick message.” All you got to do is a couple clicks and you leave a quick review. You could do that from here.

You could send a photo as you can see, send a photo of a bike that a customer's interested in. You could take a photo using the camera. You can request a payment. If they want to leave a deposit or your parts or service team wants to request a payment, they can do that right from whether it's in the app here or that inbox version you saw both before. You could schedule a message to go out a little later in the future. You could also, as I mentioned before, you can invite them to a video chat right from a message.

For example, if you're on the service team, you could actually walk them through and show them the issue that you're talking through. And we've just recently introduced a new functionality to our platform that's available and it's broadcast messaging. And a lot of our dealers have been interested in this and expressed interest in this. And it allows you to send a text message to a group of your customers and here's a couple ways that dealers use this. Everything, send extended warranty updates or send a review request at the end of the month to all of your new customers who bought something from you in the course of the month. If you have events at your dealership, you could send an invitation or notification about that. You can send sales promotions, winterization and spring tune-up specials, product upsells. So these are great for those. It just reduces the cost per customer touch. A lot of dealerships are using direct mail traditional marketing. This is just another way that you can stay in touch with your customers called broadcast messaging. And as I mentioned before, video chats are really nice tool. A lot of our customers use this whether it's this sales team or the service team.

Parts department, if they want to walk the customers through something and show them something, with one click, you can send them a link and you're directly in a video chat with that customer that you can show them exactly what it is that you're talking about. You can do live walk arounds of new and used units. They don't have to download anything on their side. So it's a really simple process. You send them a link, they click it and you're video chatting. It's easy to show parts and accessories. And it's a great way you can even use it if you wanted to kind of do a pseudo version of this where you're showing a group of people a specific equipment or bikes that you have available, things of that nature. It's also great for deal closings for F and I. They can actually share their screen like I'm doing here and walk them through a contract together. And that's available both desktop and the mobile app, both have that functionality as well.

Using text-to-pay at your dealership

And payments are really simple and easy as well within the Kenect platform. So, as you're sitting there communicating with a client in this case looks like they want to put down a $3,000 deposit, all you've got to do is click that link and a little bit of inform about what that payment is for. In this case, they're looking to buy that 2009 Harley that we've got on the lot and they get a link, they click it, and this is what they see on their side. So they get a message that says, hey, here's a link to complete that payment. They click it, it pops up with the payment amount. This is a bike deposit. They enter their card information and you've collected that payment really simply and easily. And a lot of dealers that we talk to, they've got their merchant processing machines and a couple strategic places in the dealership but oftentimes as you're kind of running around or it's really simple and easy to do this. If a customer calls in or a customer wants to pick up their bike after hours, there's a lot of really great use cases for collecting a payment via text message.

And now on the back end, you've got a really nice transaction history as well that shows everything that you've requested, what's been paid, every transaction and kind of where it stands on the back end. So we've stepped through and you saw on the front end kind of that inbox a few tabs over are payments really simple and easy to collect those payments from a text message. And as I mentioned, there's some really great ways to use this.

One of our dealers said that it saves them 10 minutes per transaction because they're just not running back and forth and jotting something down on a posted note, running it over to the finance department, having them process it and then they've got to reach back out to the customer and let them know. They just simply send that text message to pay. The customer get a nice notification that was paid. You get confirmation on your side, really simple and easy. So it's great for deposits. It's great for special orders or service tickets. A lot of our dealers use it for after-hours pickups. So there's a lot of really great ways to use that text to pay functionality in your dealership.

Getting more online reviews

And I want to shift now to one of the other key things that we really help dealers with and that's really managing their online reputation. Helping them manage those reviews that every dealer's trying to get so that people trust you when they do a little bit of research you before stepping into your dealership. We've talked through a couple of the tabs. The inbox was where all those messages come in. Reviews is really where you can manage and see all of your online reviews in one spot. So you can see we're pulling in all of the Google and Facebook reviews into one spot here and you can see them and get kind of an overarching view of where you stand.

But it's really easy to ask someone for a review right here. So you can just punch in their name, send them a message and request a review. I think it's a little bit easier to do it right from a contact and you click one link but there's a couple ways to do it, but this is all within the platform. And you should be thinking about reviews from a dealership standpoint. Here's a couple thoughts on that. 93% of consumers are going to use reviews as a first step before they engage with a dealership. 91% of those customers trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation. Online reviews are the new word of mouth. We've all been trained by Amazon to look at reviews and see how many stars and what people are saying about a product. Your customers are really no different. They're going to look at reviews to validate you. They need some point of validation and they're going to reuse reviews to do that. And 87% of consumers say they won't engage with a dealer that has low online ratings.

So they're important. They matter. They matter to you, they matter to your customers. And this is where your customers are likely finding you. This is called Google's map pack. So if somebody goes to their phone or goes to Google and they type in Harley dealer near me or motorcycle dealer near me, this is what pops up. And most people are going to click this dealer at the top. They've got 344 reviews, average of 4.2 rating on those reviews. There's a trust factor there because of those two things. This dealership's likely going to get the click or the call.

Harvard Business Review did a study on this. And they found that this page here, before they even get to your website, this page here gets five times more views than your website. So you kind of get filtered through this before they even get to you. And they've also found that a one star increase. So increasing your reviews where you going from three to four star average rating can equate to a five to 9% increase in revenue and negative reviews can cost you as many as 30 customers. So really managing that reputation online is important for you and your dealership. And we want to help with that. And your customers, what they want to see in those reviews, as they're kind of evaluating you and your dealership and thinking about kind of what they're experience might be, they're going to look for quality, what's your average star rating.

They want to see recent reviews as well. They kind of consider reviews older than 90 days old news. They want to see that you're consistently getting great feedback and quantity really matters. Below 50 reviews, most people think that's friends and family doing you a favor by leaving your review. Over 50 is kind of the minimum, 150 is really ideal to be deemed valid. Lots of people have said great things about you. And then the response is really important. That's really interesting because Google found that once people have looked at how many stars you have and they've read a couple of reviews, the next thing that they look at is your response to those reviews because it gives them a sense of how you interact with customers and how that relationship might go for them as well.

So, they want to see good or bad what those reviews say and then what you said in response to those reviews. And this is what that looks like. So reviews can be challenging asking your customers for reviews can be a little challenging to get them to actually do to follow through. Text messaging is significantly better result. You just get much more engagement with it. And if you make it really simple, this is what it looks like in Kenect. You click one button and you have a conversation with a customer, hey, would you mind leaving us review? I'll send you a quick text messages, just a couple of clicks and you can leave a review.

If they say yes, great. You send them the message. And this is what it could look like. You can customize this but this is a good example. Hey, thanks to being a great customer. Please take a moment and leave us a review. They click that button and it asks them where they want to leave that review. In this case, we're going to click Google. They click Google and now all they've got to do is click the number of stars and leave a sentence or two about our dealership and we've got a great review from a great customer. So it just takes steps out of the process.

And we've seen a couple of things that are really important to having success with online reviews. And one is taking control of the process. A lot of dealers we've seen they kind of hope that their best customers will leave them reviews, are often a little disappointed with the number of reviews that they get. And oftentimes angry customers will go out of their way to leave reviews. Customers that had an average or a good experience, probably won't.

Someone who had a great fantastic experience might go out of their way but those that just had a normal experience it could be a great experience, but not a fantastic experience probably aren't going to go out of their way unless you ask them to leave you a review even though they had a great experience. Build a repeatable process. Find that natural point to ask them for that review and do it every time. And then using Kenect is 35 times more effective than email at collecting those reviews. As I mentioned before, people open their text messages, they read those messages. And because of that, you can leverage that as a way to help you get more and better reviews, and then use them in your dealership. Use them throughout your website and in your marketing, you've earned them.

And so, kind of wrapping up, a couple of details at the end here. And by the way, again, reminder, if you have questions, put them in the question panel over there on the right and I definitely will get to those questions. But a couple of impacts that we see on the average dealership who uses Kenect. It cuts down on unnecessary call traffic, it decreases the number of voicemails going back and forth especially in the service department. It can save up to 45 minutes a day because of that is what we see on average in the parts of service teams. Huge increase in a number of new leads that you're capturing on your website. Online reviews go up significantly, payments become a lot more simple and overall a net increase of new units sold.

And so the key benefits of Kenect when we wrap all this up really and you think about what can Kenect do from my dealership? One, helps you generate more leads from your website. You can generate dozens of online five star reviews so that you stand out and you can sell more units. It's great for video chat to help your sales and service department be more effective in those communications with customers. Easy way to collect deposits and payments and you can text right from your existing business line instead of your personal cell phone. So those messages are coming in and even after hours, you can have an after-hours message that gets sent back to your customers letting them know, “hey, thanks for reaching out. We'll get back to you in the morning.” And you can save time and sell more by using photos, videos, surveys, there's lots of tools that you can incorporate into those text messages in your dealership. So Kenect includes kind of everything we talked about there. Two way texting web leads, payments, online reviews.

And one of the things that we really find is really important, we have unlimited training and support unlimited messages. So we want you to be able to communicate with your customers just as you normally would, as often as that is necessary for you. And if someone joins your dealership, we want them to be able to be trained on the software. So there isn't additional training costs or things of that. It's unlimited training and support it on our side. And so on our side when you get started, it's really kind of three simple easy steps to launch.

There's a setup call with our team, they set that lineup to be text enabled. They enable the users Kenect to Google, Facebook, all of the accounts. The next step is a live webinar training and where they'll train your staff and walk through best practices. And typically you'll start texting and using the product in five days or less. So that's really kind of the key to success. And we try to get our dealers up and running really quickly. And our goal is really aligned with most of the deals we work with. It's really to help you grow your dealership, grow your business, sell more units, generate a ton of five-star reviews, make your parts and service department more efficient and then increase your online conversions. And when you've got 150 more reviews, it can lead to about a 10% increase in conversion rates for those prospective customers. You can kind of see the ROI below there. Saving labor hours in your parts and service department because they're not spending that time back and forth, capability to sell up, extended warranties, increase in new unit sales.

And I want to leave some time here at the end for questions. And let me pull up the question panel here and make sure we've got that capability. I know there was a couple that came through here. Hang on one sec. So someone asked, does the dashboard give you the option to block or remove reviews or are all populated? Were the odds of reviews being filtered that are published? So we will pull in, in this scenario here, you saw this particular dealership was pulling in their Google and Facebook reviews. All of those reviews are going to pull in. And Google, for example, you cannot remove reviews from Google. So anyone could leave a review. If a customer has an experience, Google is in the business of really providing the best search results to their clients. So if someone leaves a review, it gets published. If it's published on Google, if it's out there and public and tied to your Google my business profile, we will pull that in and you'll be able to see it and respond to it. And I hope that answers your question, Elena.

And a couple questions have come in as well. One is timing. And I mentioned before on one of the slides, with typically less than a week to get started and that's getting your number converted, walking through the training, getting everybody up and running. If you have any integration, it's getting that integration tied in with your dealer management system, things of that nature. Dan, any parting thoughts on your side?

Dan Major:

No just appreciate the time of the Kenect team today. I guess I would add, I would steer interested parties to either go to the Dealer Digital Program website for details and service packages pricing, and enrollment options. That's where we have a comprehensive list of all of our integrated providers. And you can make the right choice for how Kenect stacks up to the needs that you have for your business.

Mike Melis:

Absolutely.

Dan Major:

It's great to include Kenect as one of our vetted and integrated providers.

Mike Melis:

Absolutely. I appreciate that, Dan. And if there are specific questions around your dealership or for the internal Harley folks, if you have questions specifically that we didn't address today, you can feel free to reach out to me there. Happy to answer those questions as well.

I want to thank everybody for joining. I don't think we have any additional questions but thank you everyone for joining us today and for your time. And we'll let you get back to what you do best. Thank you, Dan.

Dan Major:

Thanks everyone. Bye.

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