In car retailing you only get one bite of the cherry

Cuts and rises in costs affects us all in some way or other, whether we are employed, work in the public sector, are students or retired the down turn will have some bearing on our attitudes towards spending any spare cash we have. However, if you look at many businesses, especially in the retail sector, they continue to post healthy profits in spite of all the negativity around. In some cases this is down to the cutting of staff numbers and making other seemingly necessary cuts to overheads, but they appear to be working as these businesses continue to remain healthy.

In car retailing frontline staff cuts are perhaps more harmful because we all know how negatively a lack of staff can affect the attitude of customers. In the case of Tesco if the shops are too busy people will probably come back later, in the case of car showrooms you often only get one bite of the cherry.

We have all seen the consequences of allowing customers to leave the showroom having not been looked after.

It is not just lost potential sales but the fact that those potential customers will almost certainly tell a few other people that they had a bad or, more often, no experience because they were not seen to by anyone.

We are always talking about the emotiveness of our business and with such large sums of hard earned money at stake; car buyers have absolutely the right to demand high standards when making such a vital and sometimes life changing purchasing decision.

It becomes much more important for car dealers, consumed with having to make difficult decisions about staffing levels which could affect the long term survival of that particular business, get things right.

If having a lack of staff available to ensure all customers get the star treatment is bad enough its probably worse if the right calibre of staff is not available.

As we all know having great people is the key to running a great, customer facing businesses. With car buyers being far more choosy and careful about where to buy their next car from its vital that the leaders of these showrooms are on top of what is going on in their domain. They need to be 100% confident that their sales personnel are coping with taking up the slack left by any redundancies or other cuts.

The remaining staff may not like it but micro-managing is the key to ensuring that the doors keep revolving.

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