Auto Dealers Score Higher With Buyers

A flood of incentives that are keeping new-car costs low and speeding the buying process has helped boost consumers’ satisfaction with their dealership experiences to new highs this year.

The finding in the widely watched J.D. Power & Associates annual sales satisfaction study, released Thursday, is supported by other sales studies.

“Scores have been moving up pretty steadily for the past decade,” said George Peterson, president of AutoPacific Inc., an automotive research and consulting firm in Tustin. “Most of the manufacturers have got religion and have been training and coercing their dealers to improve the way they handle customers.”

The car shopper’s sales experience is based on a number of items, including the cleanliness of a dealership’s restrooms. But it is made--or broken--during price negotiations.

“Anything you can do to speed up negotiations, to give your customers honest information and to speed them through the purchase process will help your satisfaction scores,” Peterson said.

With its minimal negotiating process, General Motors Corp.’s mainline Saturn brand captured the top spot in the Power study, its third consecutive No. 1 placing for customer satisfaction with the purchase process. This year’s top score of 886 points was off slightly from 887 last year. The industry average of 839 points was up after stagnating at 835 for the previous two years.

Saturn dealers have exclusive territories and don’t stray from the posted manufacturer’s suggested retail price. That means they don’t have to compete with one another. And they don’t have customers worrying about getting a better price at another Saturn dealership and thus don’t have to pressure shoppers to “buy now or else,” said Steve Witten, senior director of automotive research at Westlake Village-based J.D. Power.

And though luxury and upscale brands from domestic and import auto makers dominate the list of top scorers--after middle-of-the-road Saturn’s first-place finish--blue-collar brands Ford and GM’s Chevrolet also finished above the industry average.

“It reflects the Big Three’s extreme push to clean up their dealers’ acts,” said David Healey, auto industry analyst for Burnham Securities Inc.

Among domestics, only Dodge and Jeep fell below the industry average in the Power study.

Still, “the domestics aren’t necessarily getting a lot better while others aren’t,” Witten said.

“Everyone is benefiting from all the incentives, and that has made all the scores go up.”

There’s no clear correlation, though, between sales satisfaction and increased sales volume. Three mainstream import car makers that have been logging major market share gains in the U.S.--Toyota Motor Corp., Honda Motor Co. and Nissan Motor Co. all failed to place above the industry average in the last few Power sales studies.

Their poor showing has as much to do with the brands’ popularity as with the often high-pressure sales environment their customers must put up with, analysts say.

It was customer dissatisfaction with price and the time it took to get vehicles that caused Nissan’s Infiniti luxury brand and Ford Motor Co.’s Land Rover sport utility brand to tumble in this year’s rankings.

Infiniti fell from fourth place last year to 10th place this year, and Land Rover dropped to 16th place from ninth last year.

Conversely, Ford’s Lincoln brand rose to third place from sixth place last year and 16th place in 1999, largely on the strength of a concerted effort by Lincoln to improve every aspect of its sales process.

“A lot of it centers on training of employees, how they dress, how well they know the product--and competitor’s products--the look and feel of the facilities and improving the processes of delivering the car, speeding up the paperwork and providing a car that is clean, gassed and ready to go,” said John Csernotta, manager of Lincoln and Mercury dealership certification programs.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Highly Satisfied

Here are the top auto brands, rated on a 1,000-point scale, in the 2002 J.D. Power & Associates sales satisfaction study. The study measures customer satisfaction with the purchasing or leasing experience. The industry average was 839.

1) Saturn 886 2) Cadillac 881 3) Lincoln 880 4) Lexus 878 5) Jaguar 877 Mercedes-Benz 877 7) Volvo 874 8) Porsche 871 9) Mercury 869 10) Buick 864 Infiniti 864 12) Oldsmobile 861 Saab 861

Source: J.D. Power & Associates