Infiniti is the big winner of a year-long study on prospect satisfaction with Tesla finishing in the bottom.
The study involved sending mystery shoppers to 6,157 dealerships across the United States, who in turn evaluated each brand’s salespeople according to the 2016 Pied Piper Prospect Satisfaction Index.
Nine out of the top 10 brands are foreign, with Infiniti beating Lexus and Mercedes, who tied in second, and Toyota, who ranked third. Audi, BMW, VW, Nissan, Porsche, Cadillac and Honda rounded out the top 10, with Cadillac being the highest-ranked domestic brand.
Tesla finished last in the study, 10 points behind the next lowest-ranked brand, Volvo. The company though doesn’t follow the traditional dealership model, using instead a direct-sales model that aims to offer a unique experience to their customer. With that said, the EV maker has always been ranked low in the Pied Piper annual study.
“Tesla leaves me scratching my head,” O’Hagan, president and CEO of consultancy Pied Piper Management, told WardsAuto. “They own all of their stores, so you would think each one would be doing the same thing. But they’re not. Tesla is consistent in its inconsistencies.”
The study found that there is a huge variation in Tesla’s dealership sales effectiveness. Some dealers did all the right things while others tended to act like “museum curators”, as he said. Only 36% of the company’s salespeople asked the customers if they had a vehicle to trade-in with the industry’s average score to be 86%, and that’s because Tesla relies on third parties to handle the trade-ins.
The biggest improvement over last year’s results was achieved by Porsche, Land Rover and Mitsubishi with the study using over 6,100 mystery shoppers between July 2015 and June 2016, ranking dealers in over 50 individual factors.
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