Pörhön Autoliike, a prestigious Finnish car dealership originally from Tornio, Lapland, turned 60 years recently. Pörhö has 13 offices with showrooms in nine different locations in Eastern and Northern Finland. The headquarters is in Oulu. Pörhö sells new Audi, Volkswagen, Nissan, Kia, Skoda, Seat, Opel, Mazda, Peugeot and Mitsubishi cars, as well as used cars in all brands. In addition to car sales, Pörhö offers a wide range of other services for car owners. This means, for example, service and spare part sales. Pörhö sells approx. 10,000 cars per year which is more than ¼ of all the cars sold in Northern Finland in a year. The company turnover this year is around 170,000,000 euros.
A change in customer behavior: online availability required
Pekka Mustonen, the After Sales Manager at Pörhö Oulu, says that the behavior of the car dealership customers today are in a constant flux, which is challenging the Sales and Marketing departments at auto dealerships. Especially the development of digital services is crucial these days also at Pörhön Autoliike, as well.
Leads and website development: Online customer service assists both Pörhö and their customers
The Pörhö webshop can be found at www.porhokauppa.fi. The webshop is an internationally well-known site on the web, as it is one of the few webshops to carry original spare parts and merchandise related to some of the car brands represented by Pörhö. The webshop takes orders worldwide. The primary site of the Pörhö car dealership at www.porho.fi, in turn, offers both car sales- and service-related information and services to customers online. What ties the two websites together is their goal: reaching the customer online.
“Online customer service plays an important role in determining the quality of the online customer experience at both porho.fi and porhokauppa.fi”, says Pekka Mustonen. “Online customer service increases our availability to the customers. We also do not have the resources inside Pörhö to take care of the customer service online by ourselves. Therefore, having the Smilee online team provide the customer service to our online customers takes care of the resourcing issue for us as well.”
“With the help of Smilee, we can both assist our customers on our website and collect feedback on both our offline and online services, which is very important for us. We have already implemented changes on our website at porho.fi based on the feedback we have got through the chat service.”
Online customer service has also increased customer conversion at porho.fi. After starting to offer online customer service with the Smilee online team, Pörhö has experienced a 63 percent rise in online car service and repair requests, and a 46 percent increase in online sales leads. “To sum it all up, I would like to say that, with the help of online customer service, we have taken our availability to a whole new level both in the eyes of our customers and our competitors in the market!”
What kind of benefits has Pörhö gained through online customer service?
- Better online customer experience
- Better availability to the customers
- Increase in online business results
- Better online conversion percent
