Posted on: Saturday, August 28, 2004
Car dealers learn from secret-shopper analysis
By Karen Dybis
Detroit News
In his first week as an automotive mystery shopper, Puerto Rico native and U.S. Marine veteran Efren Perez-Brignoni drove through Montana in temperatures 17 degrees below zero, saw his first moose and talked to dozens of auto salespeople every day without ever intending to buy a car.
Gannett News Service estimates its "field operatives" will visit 10,000 dealerships this year, studying everything from how clean the bathrooms are to whether the sales pitch includes the proper warranty information.
"Unless you consider this job to be an adventure, it's a grind," said S.H. Brown founder and CEO Steve Brown, who has made a career of studying the car-buying experience.
In today's competitive marketplace, more auto dealers say they are turning to mystery shopping services such as S.H. Brown to give them an edge over their competition. Because of Brown's investigations, dealers have fired employees. Some have rewritten training manuals.
Developed half a century ago, mystery shopping has grown into a $1.5 billion industry. It is standard practice for such companies as Kmart Holding Corp. and Starbucks Corp., which use trained shoppers to evaluate customer service or product quality.
Mystery shoppers provide "business insurance," said Joseph Sage, executive vice president of Los Angeles-based Sage Automotive Group, which includes two Nissan and one Infiniti stores.
"You sell to 20 percent of the people who come into your dealership at best. That means 80 percent is either buying from someone else or not buying at all," said Sage, whose dealerships sell 16,000 vehicles annually.
"I want the nuts and bolts of the transaction. I want to know if the salesperson connected with the consumer. And that's what Steve Brown gives me," Sage said.
Founded in 1991, S.H. Brown expects that its revenues — earned through covert shopping expeditions that test a dealer's sales and service staffs — will top $2.5 million this year.
It's the kind of work that requires "old-fashioned pounding the pavement with high-tech tools," said senior vice president Linda Magdziarz Brown, no relation to Steve Brown.
Steve Brown tends to recruit military veterans, bounty hunters and private detectives as employees. Their street smarts help him investigate what goes on at dealer showrooms for automotive companies, including Ford and DaimlerChrysler AG.
Posing as customers, S.H. Brown employees do what the company calls consumer experience audits. The average visit examines 200 data points, which the company analyzes and reports on to its clients.
Brown's team, hired by DaimlerChrysler, hit Tempe Dodge two years ago. The Arizona dealership still uses that report to educate its salespeople, said Tempe's training manager Chara DeLand.
"They asked consumer questions, not corporate questions," DeLand said. "Historically, we don't like when Chrysler does this sort of thing. ... I don't have time to deal with someone who just looks for problems. ... (S.H. Brown) came in with an open mind, and I like that."
Dealers often want to know what's going wrong, Brown said. Maybe a vehicle fails to meet sales expectations. A manufacturer might wonder why a particular pitch isn't hitting home with consumers. In one case of warranty fraud, S.H. Brown's investigation was used in court as evidence.
"Those are exactly the type of insights that clients crave," Brown said. "They don't always like to hear it, but we are always willing to tell them what the deal is."
That is a typical schedule for Perez-Brignoni, an S.H. Brown employee. The automotive forensic research company in downtown Rochester, Mich.,
Field operative Efren Perez-Brignoni, foreground, and his boss Steve Brown look over a truck in Michigan. Brown says his agents visit some 10,000 dealerships a year to secretly evaluate the sales staffs.
