MONTEREY, Calif. -

What happens when customers visit a dealer website and inquire about a vehicle? According to the 2019 Pied Piper PSI Internet Lead Effectiveness Benchmarking Study, BMW auto dealerships ranked highest overall in the study, which measured areas such as whether the customer received an email answering his or her question within 24 hours.

Rounding out the top five in the study were dealerships selling Acura vehicles, then Mercedes-Benz, Volvo, and Audi.

The Pied Piper study also looked at how dealerships use texting and website “chat” to interact with website customers. Pied Piper, which develops and runs sales and service programs to improve dealer networks’ performance, found that in replying to a customer’s website inquiry, dealerships sent customers text messages 39% of the time on average. But the dealerships did not score well in the area of first requesting customer permission to send a text. The dealerships participating in the study requested that customer permission only 5% of the time on average.

Discussing the Telephone Consumers Protection Act (TCPA) of 1991, Pied Piper said in a news release that a dealership sending automated texts without the customer’s “express written consent” could be fined $500 to $1,500 per unsolicited text sent.

“Texting is just how we Americans communicate today,” said Pied Piper Management Co. LLC president and chief executive officer Fran O’Hagan. “Most customers are willing to text with dealerships too, but any business must be careful to get permission from customers before texting. Dealers must also watch for salespeople texting from personal cell phones, bypassing dealership CRM systems.”

Pied Piper also said use of website “chat” functions has become common. Seventy-two percent of dealer websites on average promise the ability for customers to immediately chat online with a dealership representative, according to the study.  But those chat systems failed to provide a human response within 30 seconds 46% of the time on average.

“Worse than not having chat capability on a website is promising chat but failing to quickly deliver,” O’Hagan said.

Rounding out the top 10 in the study overall were MINI, Toyota, Mazda, Subaru, and Cadillac.

In conducting the study, Pied Piper sent customer inquiries through 9,264 individual dealership websites. Pied Piper asked a question about a vehicle in inventory and provided a customer name, email address and local telephone number.

Then, Pied Piper evaluated how the dealerships responded over the next 24 hours by email, telephone and text message. Pied Piper used 20 different measurements in generating a dealership’s PSI-ILE score.

Whether a customer received an email response of any type — even an automated reply — within 24 hours was the most basic measurement, Pied Piper said. On average industrywide, 8% of customers received no email reply at all.

In measuring whether the customer received an email answer to their question within 24 hours, which Pied Piper said is a more meaningful measurement, BMW, Porsche, Mercedes-Benz, Acura and MINI dealerships were the most likely to come up with an answer within that time, more than 55% of the time on average.

Dealerships selling Ford, Genesis, Buick, Hyundai, GMC and Lincoln didn’t do as well in that area, with those dealerships answering the customer’s question within 24 hours less than 30% of the time on average.

An update to ILE scoring, which increased weighting for the content of a dealership response, was new for the 2019 study. The industry average ILE score declined five points as a result of that, from 57 to 52. ILE scores ranged from zero to 100, and 15% of dealerships nationwide demonstrated an effective website-response process with a score above 80. But 34% of dealerships, with scores below 40, had a tough time responding effectively to today’s website customers.

Pied Piper has conducted its PSI Internet Lead Effectiveness Benchmarking Study annually since 2011. The company conducted the study between July 2018 and May 2019.