MSL BALLSBRIDGE FOCUSES ON CUSTOMER SATISFACTION TO DRIVE SALES

24TH OCTOBER 2018

MSL Ballsbridge Motors is one of the leading Mercedes-Benz dealerships in Ireland, boasting the largest Mercedes-Benz showroom in the country. Here, The Society of Irish Motoring looks at the history of this dealership and report on its new showroom.

As a SIMI Motor Industry Award winner, and with a ‘top performer’ rating in the Customer Satisfaction Index among Mercedes-Benz dealers in Ireland for four years in a row, MSL Ballsbridge Motors boasts some of the best-trained and most knowledgeable sales executives in the industry.

The Ballsbridge business specialises exclusively in the sale of Mercedes-Benz new and pre-owned cars. Noel Rabbitte, Brand Manager at MSL Ballsbridge explains: 'We also have two service facilities that are located on Pottery Road in Dun Laoghaire and North Circular Road, Dublin 7. We provide finance on all new and pre-owned cars through Mercedes-Benz Star Finance, which is run in conjunction with Bank of Ireland Finance. All our staff are CPD certified and are trained to a very high standard on Finance and Insurance Products.'

State-of-the-art facility

Its city-centre location adds to the distinctiveness of the Ballsbridge showroom: 'With the advent of the huge investment that has gone into dealerships around the country in the last number of years and with the movement away from city centre locations to industrial parks close to motorways, we have a very unique location in that our showroom windows look on to the pavement of a very busy thoroughfare close to the city centre.'

In the second half of 2017, the MSL Ballsbridge Motors showroom underwent a €1 million redevelopment, making it the largest Mercedes-Benz showroom in the country and one of the largest across the UK and Ireland. The newly refurbished showroom can now showcase up to 32 brand new vehicles inside the expanded premises.

The business has traditionally had a very large and loyal local customer base in Dublin city and county. 'Our long-established customers tend to change their cars with us every one to six years, depending on the customer. This loyalty is a credit and testament to the service our sales staff provide to our customers.'

Noel also notes that, in the last few years, the customer demographic has expanded with the addition of a younger customer profile: 'With the sustained product innovation that Mercedes-Benz has implemented since 2012 and with the launch of a minimum of four to five new models per year, every year for the last six years, we have been introduced to a newer and younger customer. We have also seen huge growth in our female customer base in the last five to six years in line with the new models that have been introduced.'

Customer satisfaction

Customer satisfaction, Noel concludes, is the ultimate end goal:

We work hard to ensure that a customer's experience dealing with MSL is as pleasurable from the moment they see a car online to the moment they drive off the premises on the Shelbourne Road. We believe that one of the key factors to customer satisfaction is peace of mind, which is why we are proud to be SIMI Members and ISO accredited – it shows our customers that we possess the qualities one would expect from a professional Franchised Sales Operation. Based on the feedback and testimonials we receive from our customers, we believe that we are achieving our goal of ensuring high customer satisfaction. We are proud to have achieved a score in the high nineties' percentile, an 'extremely satisfied' CSI rating, throughout 2017, but we are always aiming for that perfect 100%.

'The real key to the success of Ballsbridge Motors has always been the staff and their core values of being professional, honest, innovative, passionate and hard-working, with a strong team ethic and delivering a quality experience to the customer. Everyone that works here buys into the history, heritage and prestige of Ballsbridge Motors and we constantly strive to build on the hard work and success of previous generations to ensure that we are a successful enterprise and prepared for whatever the future of the motor industry holds for us.'