Cars and Drivers

How Porsche Dealers Took #1 in Customer Satisfaction

Chris Lange

Published: March 6, 2017 11:15 am

Last Updated: January 12, 2020 2:13 pm

Choosing the right car dealership is often one of the most important parts in the process of buying a car. Customers need to feel that they can trust the car and the dealer that they are buying it from. One method of measuring this is looking at what other customers say in terms of their satisfaction rating of the dealer.

A recent survey by industry leader, Pied Piper, took into account what consumers where saying across the board and ranked dealerships by brand in terms of which had the best customer satisfaction.

The 2017 Pied Piper Prospect Satisfaction Index rated Porsche dealers as number one in for satisfaction. BMW took second place on the list, followed directly by Mercedes-Benz and Mini. Mercedes-Benz dealerships were the most improved brand compared to the previous year.

This is the second year in a row that Porsche dealerships earned the top spot with a rating of 65, despite scoring three points lower than last year.

Ford and Mitsubishi were the highest-scoring nonluxury brands, finished tied with Acura for number eight with 57 points.

On the low end of the ratings scale, Ram and Chrysler tied for last place, with Dodge and Buick placing just above these two.

Overall, the industry average performance has been flat over the past five years and dropped slightly from 2016 to 2017, with 22 of 32 brands declining. The overall industry decline was driven by fewer responses from dealers in 2017, with one customer in eight failing to receive a response of any type. Three out of 10 customers failed to receive a personal response within 24 hours. Despite this overall industry decline, 11 brands improved their response rate from 2016 to 2017.

When Pied Piper first measured dealership response to website inquiries 10 years ago in 2008, the objective was to help dealerships measure the process followed by their employees, because that process was otherwise invisible to dealership management. A decade later, employee process measurement remains important, but today also important is identification and diagnostics of software system failures.

Fran O’Hagan, president and CEO of Pied Piper, commented:

Today one out of four lead response failures are caused by software failures. A typical dealership has three or four different pieces of third-party software that must work together seamlessly for lead response to work, and it has been our experience that when software failures occur they often remain invisible to the manufacturer and dealer.