Data Behind Dropped Calls and the Impact on Your BDC

Hello everyone. Welcome back to another volley rally today. Got Scott on here again to share some of the data behind dropped calls and the impact that it has to your BDC and your store.

So Scott, hello everybody. Hope you're doing well. When someone calls your business, they're hoping for, for help. Right. I firmly believe, just based on listening to hundreds of calls that though your, your customers care that you're in the ballpark for pricing, I don't get the, get the idea that they're, you know, worried that your oil change is $5 more or whatever. They just don't want to be aggravated and they, and they're calling for help. And your obligation is to answer the phone and keep your promises to your customers and you'll grow your business if you can keep your drop rate low. So generally in our high functioning BDCs, the drop rate is between 4 and 6% for agent drops. Those are the calls that, that agents had a chance to answer and they didn't monitor that. If you can keep track, there also are our customer drops of people who hang up right when it hits the IVR. Make sure that you're calling back 100% of those people. So how do you look at drop rate? Well, if someone drops, 59% of them will call back in. 41% never call back in again. Now we're working on the margins. You know, all 41% didn't call because they were outraged. They might have had something come up. Some people move, some people sold a car. But, but it's a very powerful number. We actually looked last year at this study and only 38% of the people called back in, in that in a seven day period. So they went somewhere else. Right. So if they, if they dropped, if they were going to drop. 69% of all drops happen within 30 seconds. By the way, average hold time over, over all the drop calls in valley from this 25 million call study was 72 seconds. So if they're willing to hang on past 30 seconds, odds are they're willing to hang out for a while. That is not a reason to make them wait. I'm just, I wanted to really highlight the importance of, of getting this call in 30 seconds. Of the people who dropped, 58% never service their car again.

So with you?

Yes, with you. Yeah. And, and the good thing, I mean service is a guarantee. Someone buys a car, there's guaranteed transactions with services, just not necessarily with you. Yeah. Drop calls take resources though. People who, we've had stores start Jake, and they're like Gosh, our call volume went down. Well, when we dig into the numbers, we see that. That they're doing so much better on the front end and lowering their drop rate that the people who do call back in are, you know, they're not gumming up the lines there. The people who do call back in call back an average of three times. So one third of the people call back multiple times at an average of three times a call. It takes resources. So what do we do with drops? Most importantly, we call them back. You don't need volley to do that. You guys need to call them back. These people are buyers. 58% of them will answer. 59% of those will schedule an appointment. The rest of them are people who are calling for status checks, looking for store hours and such. You know, you got them for other reasons. 63% of them had a previous service in the DMS. That's really significant because those are just the people that we can match the phone number with their address. It's a much higher number. So make sure.