URBANDALE, Iowa -

 It’s all about empowerment at Stew Hansen Dodge Ram Chrysler Jeep.

To achieve the distinction of being Chrysler’s top certified pre-owned dealership, used-car director Doyle Miller has put the tools of CPO success in the hands of his employees.

He makes sure everyone at the Urbandale, Iowa, store buys into the program, and pushes staff training so that all sales personnel have a firm grasp on the benefits of CPO and can express those perks to shoppers.

To ensure these customers keep coming back, Miller empowers his staff to take care of any issue a customer has after the sale should one crop up.
This empowerment seems to be paying off.

The store ranked as Chrysler’s No. 1 CPO dealer year-to-date through November, pulling in 803 certified sales. The store also ranked as Chrysler’s No. 1 store in Auto Remarketing’s "Best CPO Dealers in the USA" feature in the Feb. 15 print publication.

Overall, Stew Hansen typically sells about 170 new sales per month, with about 165 total used sales (CPO and non-CPO) each month.

“First things first, you’ve got to buy into the program. And you’ve got to make sure that all the people that you have working for you buy into the program,” Miller told Auto Remarketing late last year. “We don’t do anything halfway. Everything that we have that has an opportunity to be certified, we do certify.

“All my sales personnel, management, staff — in fact, just about everybody in the dealership —is aware of the program and is familiar with it,” he continued. “We do a lot of heavy training on that too, as far as how to sell it, how to present the certified vehicles over the non-certified vehicles.”

For instance, a Chrysler representative typically comes in every other month to go over CPO material with the staff, hitting on key points of the program and giving veterans a bit of a refresher.

Moreover, usually every other week, the dealership reviews the CPO program, as well, including what’s covered and not covered, any nuances in different coverages, and keeping folks up to date.

Customer Loyalty

That empowerment of the dealership staff also extends to the customer service arena.

Basically, if a customer comes in with a problem with a vehicle, each salesperson has the authority to help that person instead of the consumer “going through all the red tape, trying to get a hold of somebody,” Miller said.

That allows for issues to be dealt with immediately.

“A lot of it is empowering your people. I empower all the sales people that we have,” he explained.

Say, for instance, a customer has an issue with their vehicle shaking while driving and calls the dealership, Miller said. The first person they will likely reach at the store is going to be a salesperson.

“The salesperson has the power of telling the customer, ‘Just bring the vehicle in, we’ll get it taken care of.’ No questions asked … it’s just going to get handled,” he continued.

Conversely, if the customer has to jump through a bunch of hoops to reach the right person, it’s likely to upset them.

“Eventually you’re going to lose their name and number, and call them back a couple of days later and by that time, they’re already upset,” Miller added, also emphasizing the importance of “being friendly with people.”

Again, this approach seems to be working quite nicely for the dealership.

Of all the stores at which Miller has worked, Stew Hansen has the strongest customer retention, he said, calling it “far above anything else that I’ve ever seen.”

Miller stressed that personnel is a major reason why.

“You hear the old phrase of ‘kill them with kindness,’ and that’s one thing that the store does do … and obviously, there’s going to be issues,” he pointed out. “But a lot of it’s on how you handle it, how quickly you handle it.

“If a customer has a complaint, if a customer has an issue, it’s brought to everybody’s attention and everything is done right then and there to make a decision and get the thing handled,” Miller continued. “And customers seem to like that.”

Finding Used Supply

Of course, as important as customer service and training are, it’s imperative for a dealer to have an adequate supply of CPO-worthy vehicles to sell, obviously.

In fact, supply is one of the biggest issues — if not the biggest — facing the used market today.

Though he counts the dealership as fortunate that it still gets a lot of trade-ins — “well over half” of his CPO inventory are via trade-ins — Miller emphasized that getting enough used units is a big challenge.

“Just finding vehicles, in general, is tough,” he noted. “Fortunately, with our dealership, we actually get a lot of trade-ins, which really helps our business over, I would say, just about anybody else out there.”

Other that turning to trade-ins, Stew Hansen leans on a lot of factory sales at the auction.

“We’ve kind of broadened our horizons as far as going out a little bit farther than normal … hitting more auctions than we did five years ago, four years ago. The rental companies have actually, as of recently, been fairly well,” Miller said, noting that rental units have been coming off rental with slightly less mileage than they have in the past, which helps.

The dealership has someone who takes care of all the wholesale buying and selling each month. Essentially all of this is conducted online, and the person goes to perhaps one physical auction sale a month.

“This day and age, it’s almost impossible to pick one auction and spend your whole time there,” Miller noted. “With as spread out as those vehicles are, we’re buying a few vehicles here and there but it’s over a wider area.”

Reconditioning

After the supply is secured, then of course it’s time for reconditioning — an area on which Miller places a great deal of emphasis.

“That’s probably one of the biggest things. Obviously, we get everything inspected. If there’s any question on it, if we’re going to err, whether it’s to fix something or not, we will service it or we will fix it,” he said.

“It’s very, very, very important that these vehicles that are certified are ready to sell,” Miller continued. “When you start showing vehicles and you start having issues with them … it kind of defeats the purpose of the certified program. When you’re selling that program, you’re selling a lot of the service work that’s already been done to the vehicle.”

The Stew Hansen store conducts about 90 percent of the reconditioning in-house, with some of the interior reconditioning and things like body dings and paintless dent removal are sublet.

Sales/Advertising Strategies

When it comes to selling CPO, Miller stressed that “a lot of it is just making everyone aware as far as a sales staff.”

He also counts the importance of CPO merchandising and labeling the vehicles as certified. Looking at different ad mediums, Miller said that while newspaper and the Internet are the store’s two biggest advertising channels, it has cut back on newspaper and put more toward the Web.
Incentives from the automaker have also been vital for pushing Stew Hansen’s CPO sales as of late.

“They just rolled out special interest rates on the certified vehicles (in October). I think it’s helped tremendously. It’s something that I’ve actually been pushing for a long time,” he noted. “Over the last couple of months, my feeling is that we actually kind of boosted up a little bit and captured a few different customers that normally we wouldn’t have.”

Resurging Chrysler

Stew Hansen Dodge Ram Chrysler Jeep isn’t the only one that had a successful year for CPO.

On the OEM level, Chrysler has increased its certified sales 7.1 percent in 2011, having moved 114,852 CPO units through November. In the first month of 2012, Chrysler sold 8,611 CPO vehicles for an 8.7-percent gain.

Though acknowledging that some of the increase derives from what has happened in the overall market, Miller again touted Chrysler’s incentives, saying they have helped the automaker’s CPO sales.

“I really think over this last quarter with the special-interest rates, they really helped people get into the program a little bit,” he noted, referring to the fourth quarter.

Miller also emphasized that customer awareness has increased and consumers are more interested in going after the extra warranty that CPO provides and the extra service done to the vehicles.

“It seems like these customers nowadays are a little bit more cautious and a little bit more aware of those types of things,” he noted.

And that awareness seems to be bearing fruit for Stew Hansen, Chrysler and the CPO industry itself.