Recent Press

The first-of-its-kind prospect satisfaction index (PSI) for the U.S. UTV industry was recently released, with BRP’s Can-Am brand ranking No. 1 among 19 manu­facturers. Kawasaki and Honda ranked second and third, while Bobcat, Kubota and Textron were tied for fourth. Pied Piper Management Co. conducted the survey, which measured the treatment of UTV shoppers. The company develops and runs measurement/improvement pro­grams to maximize the performance of retail networks. The Pied Piper survey uncovered much more than rank­ings, however. Dealers can use the results as a road map for increasing satisfaction among their own customers.

“BRP is the ‘decathlete.’ BRP is the brand that tends to do well across the board. They may not be the top brand for every measurement, but they tend to have a process that they follow,” says Fran O’Hagan, president and CEO of Pied Piper. “We’re not a proponent of hav­ing the dealers sell the Pied Piper way or the BRP way. We want each dealer to take responsibility for their own sales process.”

O’Hagan shares more about the survey results in this conversation.

Rural Lifestyle Dealer: This is Pied Piper’s first expe­rience researching the UTV segment. What were your over­all impressions of the OPE and powersports markets?

Fran O’Hagan: The UTV market overlaps two well-established industries that previously did not compete with each other for customers: powersports and OPE. Previously, the pow­ersports industry focused mostly on leisure, while the OPE industry focused mostly on work. Today, for the UTV market, those boundaries are disappearing. What I found fascinating is the approach that the OPE brands take in selling products is very, very different from the approach the powersports industry takes. I would argue that the OPE dealers think of their customers as people who they will have a long relationship with. They will sell tens of thousands of dollars of products to this person over many years, and service is just as important as selling the unit. That is a very different approach from how a powersports dealer operates. Historically, the powersports dealers have thought of each sale as its own entity, almost to the point where the customer isn’t important.

RLD: Your approach is to use mystery shoppers as opposed to after-purchase surveys. Why do you choose that method?

O’Hagan: We found that after-purchase surveys were very misleading. Sales customers who purchased voted with their wallet. They must have liked the experience enough to make the purchase. As a result, sales customers give very high grades to their experience, whereas we know that it’s really only 1 or 2 customers out of 10 that buy on the spot. The other 8 or 9 walk back out again. Also, when a customer walks into a dealership, they are focused on, “Do I buy this model or that model? Do I get this color or that color? Am I going to finance this or am I going to buy? Is this dealer­ship going to take my trade? How long is this going to take?” The customer is not at all focused on things, such as how effectively the salesperson is building rap­port or fact-finding.

RLD: What kind of information did your mystery shoppers gather and how did the data factor into the ratings?

O’Hagan: The survey ties sales behaviors to sales success. We’re able to say that dealers who outper­form other dealers tend to exhibit certain behaviors. If we do this over and over again with hundreds of different dealerships, all of a sudden the factual measurements that are important bubble up to the top. That leaves us with some quantity of behaviors to measure and for UTVs, it’s a little over 60. We use mystery shoppers to generate PSI measure­ments, but we’re not at all interested in the mystery shopper’s opinion. To us, a mystery shopper is just an actor going through the motions, who is measuring whether certain behavior happened or not.