Before walking out the door to buy a car, van, truck or SUV at Russell Smith Auto, it’s a good idea to bring a few things so that we can speed up the process.
First of all, people need to bring their driver's license or ID. We need proof of residence, which is a utility bill or a lease. We need three current check stubs from their job. And we’ll need six references, so they need to make sure to bring the contact information. If they do all those things, they'll be in real good shape to get the process going. Then we’ll take a look at what they can offer for a down payment and go from there to get our in-house financing set up and get them into a vehicle.
The references are to make sure that when we give the loan, the car payments are met on time. So if the customer is one day late, we try to get ahold of them to make sure everything is okay – maybe they got distracted and forgot, etc. But if we can't get ahold of them, we call their references. Sometimes the customer’s number changed or the phone is lost and being replaced -- they have friends, family, or someone close on the reference list that we can usually get through to somebody to get ahold of them. So the references are really another way contact our customer if we can't through texting, phone or email.
But getting back to what the customer needs to bring with them, as long as they have everything they need, the documents that we require, we can get the ball rolling.
When we have all that sorted out and know what price range we’re working with, all that’s left is for the customer to pick the vehicle that they're interested from our inventory and get them a test drive.
We do a pretty good job of streamlining the process when the customer brings in everything we need from them because we know our customers have taken time off work or are here on their lunch break or something, or they have some place to go. We know they don’t want to spend all day at a dealership; we try to get them through the process as quickly as possible.