Research plays a major role in our mission to help dealers negotiate with confidence for their next dealership technology contract. Accordingly, in 2015 we invited our dealers to participate in a dealership phone satisfaction survey. Our continuing quest is to provide dealers with advice they can actually use in the selection process to get the best price and terms. Surveys are a great way to take our dealers’ pulse on a scale that no other consultant in the industry is able to accomplish. That makes our advice objective, meaningful and actionable. Over 380 dealers partners shared their dealer phone system experience with us. In our report we will present details about five key areas:
- Relevance of phone system & communication
- Phone systems & dealer satisfaction
- Maintenance providers & dealer satisfaction
- Phone lifetime & reasons to replace the phones
- Current & future phone system features
Here are the key findings:
- Dealers said the telephone is the most important method of business communication.
- One in six dealers is currently unhappy with their phone system.
- Just over 20% of dealers use Cisco phones, while Shoretel and Mitel telephones received the highest satisfaction scores from dealers.
- About half of all dealers use a local/regional partner for phone maintenance, but internal IT staff earned the highest satisfaction score for servicing phones.
- 34% of dealers indicated their phones are older than 6 years, and 4 out of 10 dealers plan to replace their phones within the next 5 years.
- 60% of dealers want to replace phones to add more features and update the equipment. Advanced telephone features, however, are rarely used, and most dealers don’t know which features to add when replacing the current phone system.