Customer Spotlight - Courtesy Automotive Group Achieves More Visibility

Hello, everyone. Welcome back to another Volley rally. Today I'm excited to talk with Nate from the Courtesy automotive group. Nate Auville is the BDC manager. Nate, thanks for taking the time today.

Anytime, anytime.

One thing, folks. Nate told me that he does not have a camera he can turn on, but he said he would be happy to give you all a verbal description of what he looks like for your visualization. Nate, you want to go ahead?

Six, one blonde with a big red beard.

Perfect. Awesome. So now that you'll have. Now that you all have that in your head, Nate, can you tell us a little bit about your BDC? How many agents do you have, how many stores, etc.

I have six BDC reps handling two stores at over 850 calls a day.

Okay.

Between inbound and outbound.

And what does your day look like as a BTC manager?

I wear a lot more hats than just BDC manager. But if we're just talking about BDC manager, it's normally support making sure these guys have the tools to succeed and making sure that they know what I know as far as working out of the system.

And like you said, you wear many different hats, and volley has. Has helped you, you know, manage that. And we'll get to that. But how does your day compare now? You know, before volley, what. How did running the BDC look like to you? How much more effort did you have to put in?

So essentially it was a lot less trackable. We worked out of probably, like a lot of other people, Google shared Doc online. And that in and of itself can create problems because there's no way to lock it down while still changing data. So the follow up, the reporting has been a lot easier on. On volley to track.

And so when you say no visibility, you know, prior to volley, you know, it's hard to track things. Did you know how many calls your agents were making? And, you know, did you have visibility that certain customers were being touched and all of that?

We had a rough idea of how many calls were going out and in, but we didn't have specific data to pull for that particular call.

Okay, and how long have you been on volley?

I think we started in September. I can't. I can't remember the exact date, but we've. We've been doing this for at least six months. Yeah, at least six months.

Okay. And can you talk a little bit about that transition? Because I know obviously moving over to a new system and changing all of the habits for you and the agents, I mean, that's, you know, something new to put in place. Right.

I think that support from Pearson has made things a lot easier as far as a transitional role goes. We've had continued support on reporting, on downloading reports, on viewing things, updates that you guys have come out with like the, the soon to be transitioning in live. Listen, we do go through it now through the dashboard, but you know, the, the consistently updating your guys's program helps out a lot.

And, and ever since then you feel that Pearson has been instrumental to getting all the information you need out of Ollie?

Yeah, if we didn't have Pearson and it was just relying on some of the documents that you guys have, it would have been a lot, a lot more difficult. I think that having having a live person that's intimate with the behind the scenes on the system has been, I would, I would say it was instrumental in implementing effective change.

So we know how, we know how you were before you didn't have a ton of visibility. It wasn't super trackable. For some folks who aren't as familiar with Volley who are tuning in, would you mind just taking, you know, 30 seconds and telling them a little bit about some of the neat data and visibility that you're able to have with Volley?

Yeah, I mean you can see because it can merge in with your dms. You can see things like real time repair orders, updated guest information that pushes and pulls from, you know, our, some of our other systems. Being able to like listen in live to a call that an agent is, is on at that time makes it easier from a training standpoint if you want to continue to make them better in order to like properly lead them. Using some of the reporting to pull back some of the deficiencies and kind of hyper focus on things that we need to look at helps substantially and like the, the reporting that we get from the prior day with the details helps in motivating the team as well because they get to see where they're at and they can use that metric to manage themselves as well. So it's all around good system and.

And you've been having some, some recent successes in particular some, some of the OEM requirements you have, is that right?

Yeah. So Toyota has what's called Service Connect and we've been, we've been utilizing the push pull connectivity, for lack of a better word with SCT systems and Volley systems in order to maximize basically getting in folks that need to get in for a maintenance alert or something of that nature. That's been reported to Toyota but has been made much easier because it's being directly pushed into Volley, so we can watch and manage that. And it's nice to have multiple lists to work from in one system so that you're not getting stale on one thing.

Is it easy for your agents to bounce back and forth between all of the different campaigns and OEM information for the couple stores are calling on?

Yeah, so it's pretty easy for them to get in, log into all the queues that they need to be in, and then it feeds that data throughout the day and they're hyper aware of the things that are going on in the system as well. I will know sometimes if something's wrong before Volley does just because the team is so proficient.

So you said that you wear many different hats and especially now, you know, you have some of that time back. What are some of the extra things that you're able to spend time on since you're not needing to do some of the more granular things with? Running the BDC.

Gives me peace of mind when I'm not in the office. It also allows me to, to be more present with other departments that I interact with. I'm in, in addition to bdc, I handle guest relations, so I can now go and talk to a live human being, whereas before, hey, I might have needed to help them out, you know, in the office a little bit more.

So do you have a. And I didn't prep you for this question, so it's, you know, do you have an estimation on the amount of time back that, that you're getting now?

I wouldn't be able to quantify it. I apologize. And the only reason I wouldn't is because I've taken on more since, since we got Volley, so that makes total sense.

And, and, and in some ways that's, that's an even better, you know, thing to, to go off of, is that you've saved time and been able to, to wear more hats, so to speak.

Yeah.

Do your agents enjoy using Volley as opposed to, to the standard phone system they were using before?

Yeah, I mean, a VoIP system has its ups and downs. We're at the mercy of connection to the servers. So aside from that, yeah, they are excited to come into work because it breaks up the day a lot more than it ever did before.

Awesome. Well, thanks so much for coming on and sharing your experience with Volley. Is there anything else before we wrap up that, that you would want folks to, to hear about?

I would just say if you're apprehensive because of support, don't be. At least from my experience, I'VE had plenty from Pearson, so. And the rest of the team. Not just. Not just Pearson, but mostly.

I know that Pearson's on this call. You don't need to butter him up that much.

Yeah, well, he's. He's good people, so he's good at his job.

Well, good. Well, I love to hear that and. And love to hear how much we. We've helped you and your team. I mean, we love working with you guys. So thanks so much for. For hopping on. Really, really appreciate it and. And have a great day.

You, too, Jay. Take care.