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Among the many ill-effects of the COVID-19 pandemic is the direct impact it has had on the American workforce. Offices are closed or operating at minimum capacity, the staff is remote, and the Zoom conference has replaced the in-person meeting as the most effective means of getting groups of people on the same page. Even for those not working from home, the lockdowns put in place by state and local governments have created virtual events like workouts, meet ups and happy hours that would never have been considered at the beginning of 2020. There doesn’t seem to be any indication this will be changing any time soon.

This has exposed significant issues with internet speeds recognized on both a residential and commercial level. Nearly everyone has experienced a videoconference where one or more people have a lagging connection. Nothing is more disruptive to a meeting than a choppy video feed or a participant’s dialogue being broken up, and being the person responsible for the disruption is awkward and uncomfortable.

You feel this frustration when you work from home. Maybe you have been in a virtual meeting where everything seems to be working perfectly when suddenly everything changes. Then you find out your spouse had to jump on a video call, or maybe someone else in the house starts gaming or streaming a show. Now your network is taxed and can’t meet the demand of your household.

Residential internet service providers advertise special rates with high speed promises all the time.  These speed promises range from 100 mbps up to 400 mbps.  Some even have speeds up to 1 gigabit. If this is the case for your home network, imagine the setup you need to power your dealership.   If the relatively few connected devices in your home are causing this much disruption, consider the myriad of connected devices in your dealership and the detriment this could be causing to your business.

The capability of dealership networks has always been maximized by the sheer amount of technology required to effectively run the business. All the workstations, your POS system, your DMS, your telephone system, your alarm and your WiFi are just a few of the things pushing data around your network. Today’s dealerships are more connected than ever. From your service bays to your parking lot lighting, everything is managed remotely, straining every aspect of your network from top to bottom.

COVID inspired services like virtual test drives and recorded explanations by your service team to your customers are now vying for bandwidth on your already taxed networks. Salespeople are creating video walkarounds and Facetiming with customers.  Service technicians are working on connected cars and capturing video so that work can be approved remotely.  With the recent surge of digital retailing, connectivity for salespeople and managers has never been more important.

Delays in providing these types of information will result in negative customer satisfaction leading to lost sales and diminished loyalty.

Just like you are frustrated when your video conference drops, your customers will grow frustrated by choppy video and buffering when trying to get their questions answered quickly. Buying a vehicle is one of the largest purchases many of your customers will ever make. The inability to handle something as simple as a video call gives the impression that you are ill-prepared to handle a customer’s business. This very controllable aspect of your operation can lead to lost opportunities and decreased morale of your staff as they grow frustrated working with substandard technology.

Can your network prevent this from happening? Are you able to sustain the tools you already have and support the addition of new ones? Most dealerships don’t know some important facts about their own network or what really matters when assessing their network speed and reliability.  That’s why automotive retailer technology services provider, DealerIT, commissioned a speed test across over 1,100 dealerships nationwide, measuring speeds at various times of day on multiple days per week.  Needless to say, the average results we found paint a concerning picture.

Over the next few months, we will share insights from this national speed test along with best practices on how to assess your dealership’s network speed and reliability, so please stay tuned. We will present most everything in written form to ensure we don’t tax your network unnecessarily.