Pied Piper Prospect Satisfaction Index (PSI) is one of the major ranking systems out there assessing the US motorcycle industry and its dealerships.
To give you a quick primer on how scoring works, Pied Piper takes into account a mixture of “mystery shopper” experiences, along with actual sales success for each brand, thus giving a mixture of subjective and objective measurement.
For this year’s assessment, it comes with little surprise that Ducati is once again taking the top honors, followed closely by Harley-Davidson and Victory — two brands that have high customer satisfaction, according to Consumer Reports.
This is ninth year that both Harley-Davidson and Ducati have been in the Top 3 sports on Pied Piper’s PSI, which should give some insight into why those two brands have such loyal followings.
What is more interesting though are the brands making headway. We can see that MV Agusta has jumped up four points since last year, an early sign of the metamorphosis that MV Agusta is currently in the process of undertaking. Aprilia also has made big moves, climbing up 10 points since last year’s assessment.
It is also interesting to see that a vast majority of brands fall below the industry average on the index, indicating that some brands clearly lack in their dealership experience compared to others.
Pied Piper is quick to point out though that this year’s PSI has the highest overall combined ranking over any year, so the motorcycle industry is slowly making progress overall, even if certain brands are lacking behind, like KTM and Husqvarna.
According to the PSI results, dealers are offering more test rides, getting more customer contact info, and encouraging more customers to take a seat on a bike they are interested in.
Unsurprisingly, a motorcycle brand that is more likely to be in a dealership that carries more than one brand, is at a higher risk for a salesperson to suggest a different brand to a buyer.
As such, one in four Kawasaki customers found that their salesperson encouraged them to buy a different brand — a figure that jumped to one in five customers for brands such as Yamaha, Suzuki, MV Augusta, Indian, Husqvarna. and Aprilia. Meanwhile salespeople for Harley, Victory, and Can-Am stuck to their brand 97% of the time.
While it is correlative only, Pied Piper says that when dealerships are ranked along their PSI score, the dealerships ranked in the top quarter sell 22% more bikes than the dealerships in the bottom quarter.
As always, the Pied Piper Prospect Satisfaction Index should give managers of OEM dealer networks something to chew on as they enhance and grow their dealer network.
Source: Pied Piper
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