Playbook, car dealership
Getting into the showroom, and getting into the car
Access requests arrive at a dealership in two forms that have almost nothing to do with each other. One is about the building, which is a matter of a ramp, a door width and where the lavatory is. The other is about the product, which is whether a vehicle can be adapted for the person who is going to drive it, and no amount of accessible parking answers that. Conflating them produces a reply that misses the question entirely.
Why this is not the general answer
The handling pattern for accessibility requests holds across every trade. What follows is the part that does not.
- Two unrelated questions share a heading. One is answered with measurements of a building and the other with what can be fitted to a car, and the second one is the one people are usually asking about when they contact a dealership rather than a shop.
- The showroom is the easy half and service reception is the hard half, because it sits at the workshop end of the site behind vehicle movements, and somebody routed there on foot may be crossing a working yard.
- A driver with an adapted licence or a condition that affects driving has a test drive question the standard eligibility page does not answer, and improvising it at the desk goes badly in front of somebody who has thought about it far more carefully than the salesperson has.
- Adaptations are usually fitted by a specialist rather than being a factory option, so the answer involves a third party who has not been consulted, and a commitment made in a chat window binds a business that does not know it has been volunteered.
How it arrives
- is there wheelchair access to the showroom
- can a car be fitted with hand controls
- is there an accessible toilet
- can i test drive with hand controls fitted
- is there a disabled parking space near the door
- can somebody bring a car out to me instead
What has to be indexed for this to work
| The building described in measurements, both entrances | Step heights, whether there is a ramp and its gradient, door widths, whether the lavatory exists and where it is, and the same again for service reception, which on most sites is a separate building with a separate answer. |
|---|---|
| The route to service reception on foot | Written honestly, including whether it crosses an area where cars are being moved, what the surface is like, and what the alternative is for somebody who cannot manage it. This is the part that gets left out and it is the part that matters. |
| What you can and cannot arrange in the way of adaptations | Whether anything is done in house, whether it goes to a specialist, and what has to be decided before a car is ordered rather than after. A buyer who learns after collection that a control could only have been fitted at build has been failed at the enquiry. |
| Your published position on coming out to somebody | Whether a car is ever brought to a customer, whether paperwork can be done away from the site, and how such a thing is arranged. Publish it even if the answer is limited, because it is the request that most often has nowhere to go. |
The reply
The showroom has level access at the main door and an accessible lavatory, and the measurements are on our access page [1]. Service reception is a separate entrance at the workshop end, and the page describes the route and the surface, because it is not simply the same door [2]. On hand controls, whether something can be fitted depends on the car and it is usually work done by a specialist rather than by us, which is a conversation to have before an order rather than after [3]. Send me your name, an email and what you need and the team will call you to go through it properly.
It answers the building question with facts and then treats the adaptation question as the separate thing it is, rather than letting one stand in for the other. Pushing the adaptation conversation to before the order is the single most useful sentence here, because after the order it is often too late to do it properly.
Where it stops
The trigger. Any question about fitting a specific adaptation, any test drive request from a driver whose situation the published eligibility rules do not cover, and any request for somebody to come out.
This needs somebody who can look at the specific car and at what you need, and I cannot arrange anything. Leave me your name, an email and a note of what you are after, and the team will call you.
It stops answering before it guesses, says who will pick it up, and asks for the one thing that makes a reply possible. Nothing about it reads as a dead end.
Never say this here
Out of bounds
- Never say a particular adaptation can be fitted to a particular car, since that depends on the vehicle and usually on a specialist who has not been asked.
- Never say a test drive can go ahead for a driver whose circumstances the published eligibility rules do not cover, because that is the insurance arrangement's answer and not the dealership's.
- Never describe the site as accessible as a single word, when the showroom and the service entrance can have completely different answers.
- Never promise that anybody will come out to a customer or bring a car to them, as nothing here books a person's time.
Questions
- Can it arrange for somebody to bring a car to a customer?
- No. It books nothing and allocates nobody's time. What it can do is publish whether you do that at all, which is more than most dealership sites manage, and take the enquiry so the right person rings back.
- How much building detail is useful here?
- Measurements rather than adjectives, and both entrances rather than the front one. A step height and a door width let somebody decide for themselves. Fully accessible tells them nothing and is quite often wrong about the service end of the site.
- Why treat the adaptation question separately from the building?
- Because they are different enquiries from different people with different urgency. Somebody asking whether a car can take hand controls is deciding what to buy, and answering them with a note about the ramp reads as not having read the message.
Keep reading
- Everything for a car dealershipStock moves daily and finance adverts are regulated, so this is mostly about what a dealership assistant must never claim to know.
- Handling accessibility requests in generalTwo different things arrive as one message. A published accessibility statement answers the first. The second is a request, and it needs a person.
- Money back is easy to say and complicated to routeWhere a lender paid for the car, the customer is not who the money returns to, and that single fact reorders the entire conversation.
- Describing a car from the listing without claiming it is still thereA crawled listing is a photograph of yesterday. The assistant can describe a car in detail and still must not say it is unsold.
- What your car is worth, and the appraisal that decides itA valuation turns on condition, mileage and history, and none of them survive a chat window. The appraisal is the quote.
Try it on your own material
Upload a document or point it at your site, paste one line of HTML, then ask it something only your business could answer.