A Service BDC Manager's Day-To-Day Using Volie

Hello everyone and welcome back to another volley rally. This week I'm joined by JK from Maplewood Toyota. Jk, how are you doing today?

I'm doing very well, thank you. How are you?

I'm doing awesome. Really appreciate you taking the time to talk about your day as a BDC manager, but do you want to introduce yourself what all you do in the store?

Sure, absolutely. So again, my name is JK and not only am I not only my with Maplewood Toyota, but I'm also with Invergrove Toyota. Owned by the same person, operate completely separately but then we share the BDC here. So my exact title would be Service BDC Manager and I've been with the company, it will be 11 years in December. So I've seen a lot of change over the years that I've been here. So I'm excited to get into that with you as well. Jake. You know, my main role every single day is to be the Service BDC manager. So a lot of it is going to be monitoring the agent activities and their productivity. Phone traffic is a huge part of it. I'm constantly watching the queue, especially on days where we are going back and forth from inbound and outbound. So that's a big part of it. Maintaining the coverage is always going to be, you know, biggest priority. Inbounds are going to be your highest priority overall. So being able to kind of identify, you know, where we have holes, where we need to, you know, add more people back into the inbounds or when it can, you know, actually quiets down and being able to kind of catch up on a lot of those outbound contacts too. So, you know, invested, investigating customer concerns, pulling phone calls, you know, for our service managers whenever that's needed. Discrepancies that we might come across in the collaborating with our customer success manager and kind of just doing that sort of investigation and research into why things are the way that they are or how profiles got merged or how they got mixed up. So doing a lot of that auditing the agent's phone calls, you know, listening to some of the phone calls that they have and interactions they have with customers and then continuing that coaching with them even when you know, they're months into their position. So. So a lot of one on one activity with my agents, a lot of communication between me and my agents and the service managers and service advisors throughout the entire department.

Well, it sounds like you do a lot of, as you said, one to one interactions with your agents. You're monitoring their activity throughout the day and I'VE actually been and visited you in person and I know that you run a pretty tight ship there in a good way. So I mean you do a good job of managing the team. So with that said, can you talk a little bit about what your day in Volley looks like? What are you doing in the software yourself?

You know, I mean for the most part I'm living in the live dashboard, right. That's going to give me everything that I need to see agent statuses, queue, whole times, jobs and things like that. Right. So I'm that's going to be the main dashboard that I'm living in all day. It gives me everything that I need to know at a glance. Aside from that, you know, as you can probably already imagine, I'm living in the reporting world which like you mentioned, you guys pretty much built everything for me. A lot of stuff is very just automated at this point when it comes to reporting. Whenever a manager asks for this data or that data, it's boom, boom, boom, got it done, sent. So I'm constantly looking at trends is a big part of my role too is how are we performing month over month, how are we performing day over day and watching that data fluctuate. Aside from that, then living in the admin tab too whenever we have to make any quick changes to customers information, pulling phone calls, updating campaigns and changing the parameters, things like that. A lot of backend stuff as needed throughout the day. I still obviously rely a lot on our customer success manager with certain things, but it's totally user friendly for the most part. It's pretty easy for me to navigate my way around the back end of things.

As you talk about, I live in the live dashboard, I look at the reports, they update automatically, Volley's built them, you know, all that stuff, right?

Yeah.

How has your day changed? You know, you've said you've been there for 11 years which congratulations. I mean that's a long time to be in any position. But how, how has your, your role evolved since you've added Volley and a lot of those things are automated?

Oh my goodness, it's evolved a ton. I mean it's taken away a lot of manual reporting. I mean it's definitely. Excel has now become kind of my geeky thing and you know, back in the day, whenever I look back to when I first started here and just having to deal with use the programs that we had to use then, that wasn't necessarily built for a bdc. So having to manually create tasks or customers for the BBC agents to call was Just time consuming, having. I remember doing tick logs, you know, having to manually check the inbounds and the outbounds. It's taken that all away for myself and for my agents. You know, I still have some custom reporting that I, that I work on on a day to day basis, but most of it I'm just pulling over from Volley. You guys, you know, have built out a ton of great reporting that gets extremely granular, even more granular than I would have ever even thought of. So a lot of the manual process has gone away. Another big part of it is transparency. I can see anything down to anything really. There isn't anything that you can't find in there when it comes to the agent's activity to the campaign performances gives you all the visibility that you really need. And I feel like even though I'm doing less work, I have more control over day to day operations. Just having to deal with use the programs that we had to use then that wasn't necessarily built for a bdc, so having to manually create tasks or customers for the BBC agents to call was just time consuming. I remember doing tick logs, having to manually check the inbounds and the outbounds. It's taken that all the way for myself and for my agents. You know, I still have some custom reporting that I, that I work on on a day to day basis, but most of it I'm just pulling over from Volley. You guys, you know, have built out a ton of great reporting that gets extremely granular, even more granular than I would have ever even thought of. So a lot of the banging process has gone away. Another big part of it is transparency. I can, I can see anything down to anything really. There isn't anything that you can't find in there when it comes to the agent's activity to the campaign performances gives you all the visibility that you really need. And I feel like even though I'm doing less work, I have more control over day to day operations. The automation is phenomenal. I love that. Not having to worry about manually uploading a list every single day has changed my day to day responsibilities. The communication with customers and their overall experience, I mean, to customers, they probably don't realize it. They're just calling a dealership to call the dealership like they have for 40 years at Maplewood Toyota. But they don't realize that we have a paper trail for everything. We can see that they've communicated with this agent and that agent before. It was, hey, somebody in the service department. Did you guys talk to this person and everyone's like, we don't know. But now we do. And that's come a very long way. Another big piece about this customer experience is the missed calls function. We used to not be able to track or see which customers hung up or got dropped in the process while they're waiting in the queue. And now that we can see all of that and being able to call these customers back, they appreciate it. Even though they're like they, even though it was probably their fault, they appreciate the phone call back that, you know, we saw them and we care about what they were calling us about. And so we're here now to help. So that's been a big game changer for us for sure.

Well, one of the trends we see is a lot of those customers who drop off, they don't end up calling back in. So very glad to hear that you guys are able to have visibility on that, track that and empty that queue. Is there anything that kind of going off of how your, how your days change and all the things that you're able to get to, like you said, all the manual tasks that you were doing are gone. Is there anything that, that you're doing now that's in your day to day that are things that you're able to do because you have more time?

Absolutely. My role has evolved a little bit in the last couple of few years as well. I now help oversee the digital marketing and advertising for the service departments at both stores as well. So it has expanded, you know, my brain a little bit more when it comes to BDC overall in general. And the marketing piece has just, it just makes sense. I mean, bdc, it falls underneath the marketing umbrella. So now being able to also make decisions and see the creative that we are sending out via hardmail or email and then communicating that to the agents so that they're aware of the, that these customers could be calling in with this very specific special. So it has broadened up a lot of my time to be able to put a full focus on marketing in general for this, for the whole service department.

How many agents do you guys have there?

I currently have 12 agents.

And do you know how do they enjoy, how's their day changed? Do they enjoy calling out a volley? Do they?

They do, absolutely. They don't even know how to use their physical desk phone really anymore at this point. I still kind of have to walk over and teach them where, you know, which buttons to press to get to where. So they're all cloud based now. I mean they're, you Know they're extremely tech savvy and whatnot. So yeah, they really enjoy working in Bali. You know the ones who were here prior to Volley who are able to kind of go through the transition and be able to experience the manual life down to now to the automated cloud based life, they absolutely enjoy it. It's definitely helped them a whole lot with their efficiencies. Being able to be fed all of the information that they ultimately need to contact a customer, whether if it's inbound or outbound, has truly saved them a lot of time in researching the customer's information and the vehic vehicle service history and things like that. So it's definitely helped them a lot with their efficiencies and so this was definitely a good move and they were all for it when, when we made the, the launch.

Awesome. Well, thank you very much. You know, you're very valued partner. We love working with you and Pearson who's for everyone else there. Customer success, customer success rep, loves working with jk, loves working with the stores and I mean nothing but great things to say. We appreciate you taking the time to come on here. Is there anything else that you wrap up here? Anything else that you want to mention about your day in Valley as a manager?

You know, not necessarily. I mean, you know, just kind of piggybacking back to, you know, the transparency and the visibility. I mean ultimately at this point I can be anywhere at any time like before because I do get pulled into, into meetings and we have multiple buildings at our location so I'm constantly roaming the campus. But being able to be anywhere and anywhere and I'll be able to see the live activity that's going on definitely, you know, puts you at ease, you know, not with the fact that you're not physically in the office to be with your agents, but you can still monitor everything and still, you know, fix it, correct it on the go, whenever, wherever you are, whether if you're at work or when you're not at home. And I'm not working from home, I'm. I sign on sometimes. You can totally leave this out but it has become extremely helpful when it comes to, you know, watching the day to day operations and not physically being in my office.

Well, I totally know what you mean. And again I've been there to visit you and the room where we met physically, we were like four buildings down from where the BDC is physically located. So I can totally see that. If you're pulled into a meeting but you want to have the dashboard open to be able to see what's going on. I mean, I get it. I get what you're talking about, for sure.

Yep. Absolutely.

Awesome. Well, jk, thank you very much for taking the time to walk through your day with us and walk through your experience with Volley. We really, really appreciate it.

I appreciate you guys thinking of me. I am thankful for the support from everybody from Volley, and I look forward to continuing to work together.

Awesome. And thank you for everyone listening. Have a fantastic day.