Working for a car dealership can teach you many things. One of them for me has been that going to school for public relations and working here can be counterproductive and it can reveal the flaws that make the car business the “car business.”

What needs to be fixed:

• Everyday there is another example of bad communications between departments. Whether there is a new employee starting or someone moves to a different department, no one seems to know what is going on until it is over. There are no emails (the super easy way to communicate in the corporate world) sent out to keep everyone updated. If there are any changes going on, the news begins as gossip, works it’s way around the different offices and is finally taken to a manager and even then you can’t be sure that is the truth. You would think with only 70 employees in the store it would not be so difficult.
• Salespeople are encouraged to send out letters to their customers. Yes, it is good to keep in contact with your customers, but not when the letters are “edited” by managers that have no writing background. We have two people at the dealership with strong communication skills, my direct manager and myself. Neither of us see these mailers before they go out, only when they come back due to incorrect addresses. This leads to bad branding of the dealership.
  • The letters usually lack: wh_si_34front.jpg
    
    • The logo of the dealership
    • Correct spellings and sentence formation
    • Professional and informational message to the customer
  • Major car companies all over the world rely on their brand to speak for itself, why aren’t we?
• Another flaw that most dealerships including ours has is that they do not know what their employees do all day and what they are capable of because they have no annual reviews. Not only does this lead to unhappy employees but also to a misunderstanding of employee-employer expectations. If you want to get a raise, you better have a laundry list of reasons why you deserve one and the guts to go to the top man himself and ask! This also has lead to a lot of “extra fat” around the dealership. By “extra fat” I mean that we could let go of about three office people and not be over worked because there is so much internet surfing and personal phone calls taking place that those paid hours are  a waste.

Along with these major but ignored flaws, there are benefits to working at a car dealership. They have free lunch on Saturdays, flexible schedules and a nice coffee machine with hot chocolate. Seriously, there are a lot of good things being done at my dealership, but wouldn’t fixing these problems increase sales and improve employee moral? I think so.