General Motors’ Buick brand performed poorly in the 2022 Pied Piper PSI Internet Lead Effectiveness (ILE) Study – an annual analysis that measures how many sales leads are funnelled to a particular brand’s retail storefronts through its website.
To conduct this study, Pied Piper, a retail research firm that uses mystery shoppers to conduct studies, submitted mystery-shopper customer inquiries through the individual websites of 3,628 dealerships, asking a specific question about a vehicle in their inventory, and providing a customer name, email address and a local telephone number. The company then evaluated how the dealerships responded by email, telephone and text message over the next 24 hours.
Via Pied Piper
Buick received an ILE score of 49 out of a possible 100 points in this analysis, which placed it third last in the study. The only brands to perform worse than Buick were Ford and Fiat, which earned lowly scores of 48 and 47, respectively. Pied Piper assigned scores based on how quickly a dealership responded to their inquiries and how personal the response was. Dealers were docked points if they responded slowly, did not respond at all or if the customer inquiry was incorrectly funnelled to the dealer’s spam email folder.
Pied Piper found that Buick dealers responded to its email and/or text message inquiries within 30 minutes less than 30 percent of the time. By comparison, dealers for brands like Infiniti, Lexus, Chrysler, Subaru, Alfa Romeo and Cadillac responded within 30 minutes more than 50 percent of the time. Buick dealers also failed to respond to customer phone inquiries in any capacity roughly 45Â percent of the time.
A low score in this study is indicative of a rather straightforward and easy-to-solve problem: Buick dealers aren’t responding to customer inquiries fast enough, and sometimes aren’t responding at all. These storefronts will likely see an uptick in sales if they can respond to customer inquiries in a timely manner and ensure they aren’t ignoring any inquiries – whether it be by accident or on purpose.
“Dealers who respond quickly, personally, and completely to website customer inquiries on average sell 50 percent more vehicles to the same quantity of website customers as opposed to dealers who fail to respond,” said Fran O’Hagan, CEO of Pied Piper.
Chevy was ranked average in the Internet Lead Effectiveness study, while Cadillac had an impressive performance, coming in second.
Subscribe to GM Authority for more Buick news and around-the-clock GM news coverage.
Comments
I’ve given Buick my feedback about their website. My complaints were 1) for a long time in their “Vehicle Lineup” they showed the 2022 Encore, Encore GX, and Envision, but the Enclave pictured and listed was 2021; 2) there’s no sense of excitement with the aging Encore and listing the Envision and Envision Avenir and the Enclave and Enclave Avenir as separate vehicles (they’re just trims); 3) while other GM brands have sections for “Electric” and / or “Future & Concept” vehicles, Buick incredibly has a section for “Legacy Vehicles” (i.e., the discontinued Cascada, LaCrosse, and Regal; and 4) they don’t capitalize on the various high rankings that Buick has in the J.D. Power and Consumer Reports polls. The website just doesn’t promote desirability.
PIED PIPER, IS NOW THE GREATEST!!! THIS IS ALL BECOMING A JOKE, BY BY