DealersEdge Professional Forums

I posted earlier with no responses regarding the company Dealership for Life, which is fine bc I think they don't have a lot of clients. I am curious though, do any of you at your stores use any sort of loyalty/rewards program at your store? Something similar you would see with credit card companies or otherwise where the customer earns "points" for getting work done or buying parts at your dealership? I am one of a few at the store to make a decision on such a thing and the Dealership for Life is very expensive and appears to not have attracted a lot of dealers. Rather than me just giving my "no" vote, I would like to know if there are any other loyalty programs out there? Even something done in-house? Thanks so much, Cain

We do our own preferred owners program.

Does it require a full time person? Any software involved or just manually done? Thanks!

No. Someone in the office inputs the customer information into a website to set the card up then the cashier goes on the website to input the transaction when they purchase something.
Not sure what the website is or exactly how they do it I just know the cashier takes the card and goes online to input the transactions.

At the last dealer I worked for, Service had a little plastic key tag for each oil change customer, which was punched by the cashier when she received the keys & paperwork for the oil change. Once the customer had 4 punches, the 5th was free. Customers seemed to like it and it worked well for retention since there were no strings attached! Service had a local company make the tags for us.

We use the GM approved loyalty program, the customer "earns" $5 - service, and $500 sales credit when they sign up, and .5% of each service RO. I don't like it because it's misleading, I've made a lot of people mad because I can't let them use the $500 (or the $5) towards parts. I also hate that it gets billed back to my department each month as advertising.

Denise Trimble wrote:At the last dealer I worked for, Service had a little plastic key tag for each oil change customer, which was punched by the cashier when she received the keys & paperwork for the oil change. Once the customer had 4 punches, the 5th was free. Customers seemed to like it and it worked well for retention since there were no strings attached! Service had a local company make the tags for us.

We do that here.

Funny though, last week we had a customer that's only had 1 oil change here before come in with their card fully stamped LOL.. Gee I wonder how that happened?

Zep33 wrote:

Denise Trimble wrote:At the last dealer I worked for, Service had a little plastic key tag for each oil change customer, which was punched by the cashier when she received the keys & paperwork for the oil change. Once the customer had 4 punches, the 5th was free. Customers seemed to like it and it worked well for retention since there were no strings attached! Service had a local company make the tags for us.

We do that here.

Funny though, last week we had a customer that's only had 1 oil change here before come in with their card fully stamped LOL.. Gee I wonder how that happened?

We used to have the punch card program here also, even had to buy special punches with fancy shapes so the customers could not stamp the oil change key tags themselves. We had lots
of problems with people cheating the system.

We are on the Dealership for life program. It's a sales/service thing. In parts we just order the oil treatment they sell. We refer to it as "snake oil". I guess it's decent as a selling point. It doesn't make me any money. I suppose it does indirectly if people buy a car or bring their car in for service which is the whole point of it... retention.

OilleakEarl wrote:We are on the Dealership for life program. It's a sales/service thing. In parts we just order the oil treatment they sell. We refer to it as "snake oil". I guess it's decent as a selling point. It doesn't make me any money. I suppose it does indirectly if people buy a car or bring their car in for service which is the whole point of it... retention.

thank you. whats the general feeling? They have ONE dealership is our big state of California, so that concerns me