How a couple in West Virginia gave customers a new, better RV buying experience
Back in 2017, Gina and Joe Starett were in the market for a new RV to fuel their love of camping and the outdoors. Unfortunately, they weren’t impressed by the customer service at the dealerships they visited. So they decided to give other prospective RV buyers what they didn’t have and started their own dealership. They opened Mountaineer RV & Outdoor Center, LLC in West Virginia the following summer.
We talked to Gina about how their business started and grew, how Lightspeed supported them along the way, and how it feels to give their customers a great experience.
“We searched across three states for an RV, and when we were met with poor customer service and a lack of expertise, my husband said on the way home, ‘That’s it. Let’s just start our own RV dealership,” Gina recalls. “I thought that was crazy at the time.”
But as the saying goes, “it’s so crazy, it just might work.” Once they were up and running, they realized they needed help staying organized and guiding the customer throughout their buying journey.
Finding the right RV Dealer Management Solution (DMS)
Before getting connected with Lightspeed—and not looking back—Gina and Joe tried a couple of different platforms to help keep their business organized.
“We started with a DMS that was not set up correctly, nor did we have what we needed at our fingertips in order to run [the dealership] efficiently,” said Gina. “So within 4 months, we made a switch to another DMS.”
The next DMS, she shared, didn’t have an accounting system and was lacking in reporting capabilities. Gina is an accountant and a self-diagnosed “information junkie,” so she wanted to have more data to be able to make adjustments to their business.
“The frustration was born out of a need for a warranty report and a route sheet of some sort,” she said. “We wanted to find out where our customers were in their purchase or service journey, and that wasn’t really built into the DMS we were using.”
Then in 2020, they saw an ad for Lightspeed and got onboarded.
“From the beginning of working with Lightspeed, we found out what was at our fingertips,” said Gina, “from discovering ways to be more profitable to training resources to customization options.”
“We’ve had Lightspeed for four years, and to this day, we still don’t realize the full capabilities of it.”
Treating the customer right
Gina recounted her experience with their RV purchase back in 2017: “We had sold a unit, and we were in between that and purchasing a new one. We had also just sold a business and had some extra time, so we went to three different states looking… sometimes the places were dirty, sometimes they weren’t informed on the different units they had.”
Gina and Joe committed to giving their customers an excellent experience from the moment they walk in the door.
“When you come in, first off, you’re treated like a family across all our departments. Second, when you are on the lot, the salesmen have the Lightspeed mobile app at their fingertips, so they can answer any questions and take down the customer’s information, right there.”
She describes a seamless effort that works behind the scenes to make the customer experience run smoothly: “Lightspeed interlocks every department in our dealership.”
Growing with Lightspeed
As the business grew, Gina and Joe wanted to invest more in what Lightspeed could help them do.
Gina explained: “Since us launching [Lightspeed} in 2020, we have added several capabilities. We have integrated with our website developer, so we push information straight to our website from Lightspeed. We have added integrations with manufacturers and part distributors, and we’re looking into the new RV Partfinder tool too to help us streamline our service department.”
Mountaineer RV has since opened a second location, and even that was aided by Lightspeed: “It was easy to set up that second location. The same Lightspeed was there to walk us through all of that, so that if something is not working, they can remotely see our issue firsthand. It’s beautiful.”
Going forward, Gina and Joe are looking to add even more to their Lightspeed portfolio. “We are looking into how we manage our inventory based on length of time. Let’s say that we want to after it’s been here for 90 days, we would like to deescalate the margin by 5%, just to move the unit.”
Looking back on what they’ve built
When asked what advice she would give to new dealers, she said that “input equals output.”
“If you want good information, you have to be solid in what you’re measuring when it comes to the performance of your departments and that requires entering in the information to your DMS, accurately. You’re only going to get out of what you put into it.”
The Starett’s motivation to build this business comes from a simple love of the outdoors, and the desire for others to experience what camping and nature have to offer.
“Our hearts are wanting others to enjoy it,” she said proudly. “We truly want people to camp and understand it, feel it and experience it, and see it. And when you come into our stores you’re gonna experience something that you don’t get anywhere else.”
They were recently named a Top 50 RV dealer in America, and in addition to their hard work and dedication to a great customer experience, they also give credit to Lightspeed.
“Lightspeed gives us the ability to measure. We can look at so many different data points and angles to help evaluate, run our business, and support our customers. And it’s all right there at your fingertips.”
With an all-in-one DMS platform, that data is easily tracked and organized, and it has helped the Starett’s bring the dream of a quality RV buying experience to life.
