Recent Press

To complete the 2021 ILE study, Pied Piper submitted customer inquiries through the individual websites of 6,407 dealerships between July 2020 and March 2021, asking a question about a vehicle in inventory, and providing a customer name, email address and local telephone number. Pied Piper then evaluated how the dealerships responded by email, telephone and text message over the next 24 hours. Twenty different measurements generate dealership ILE scores, which range from zero to 100. Some 17% of dealerships nationwide scored above 70, requiring a quick and thorough personal response, while 44% of dealerships scored below 30, showing failure to personally respond in any way to their website customers.  

Now in its 11th year, the ILE study for 2021 implemented a modification to scoring which required answering a customer's question by email or text as the only way to "stop the timeliness clock." The industry average ILE score was unchanged by the modified scoring, but the change moved average scores for individual brands by as much as five points. In general, brands whose dealers were more likely to personally respond to customers benefited from this change, in contrast to brands whose dealers relied more on auto-responses and fixed email templates.