Drop Rate Statistics with Scott Davis

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to another Volley rally. Today I'm joined by Scott again here. Scott, how's it going?

Doing great, Jake, doing great.

We're excited to get you and I back together for another one of these. Obviously it's been fun having some other people come in and out on them. But today we're going to talk about the importance of calling back people who you missed. You know, the importance of working to lower your drop rate. And what are your first thoughts with that, Scott?

You know, I think a lot of people listening to this, especially if you don't have volley, but you know, most systems you can see who missed a lot of the key to business first is keeping the promises from the people that you currently work with, and a lot. And some of that's to answering the phone. So managing your drop rate and missed calls, and it's all part and parcel of it, is very important.

Can we, before we go further, define what it, what we mean by drop rate?

Sure. So we have, we have two kinds of drop rates. The first one is an agent drop. Those are ones where the agent had a chance to answer the phone, the customer went on hold and they hung up. So the second one is a customer drop. Essentially it hits the IVR or the recording. Hi, thanks for calling volley Toyota. Press 1 for sales, pursue for service and they hang up and the dealership has no chance to answer those people back also. But, but yeah, that's how we define drop rate.

And you have some, some really interesting statistics to share today, right?

Yeah, we, we looked at, we looked at 3.4 million inbound calls very recently that we had. And of the drop rate of the people who dropped, of that, 74% of them had a previous appointment for the dealership. So these were buyers, 74% had a previous appointment. Of the people who dropped that the dealer didn't call back, 63% of them did not call back in seven days. So hopefully I'm hoping for our customer's sake that they were all people doing status checks and not trying to get new appointments and they got that information elsewhere. But by and large, people don't call back.

And that makes me think that a lot of the folks who we speak with who aren't doing any outbound, if you're going to do any outbound, you should focus on calling these people back, don't you think?

Well, it's fundamental. I mean, the very first thing you do is, is try to help the people who are looking for help. So when we looked at across those three Point million, four million calls. Of the people who dropped, um, if you called them back, and this is, this was customer pay, customer drop and agent drops together. 50, 53% of them answered, 54% of them answered. And third, 53% of them answered and 34% of them scheduled an appointment. So they converted a very high level and they're looking for help for sure.

And you know, just to compare for, for people you say that's a high level. What, what normal conversion rates do you typically see on stage? Similar, you know, campaigns.

Yeah, I mean, so this was across all campaigns that we, that our dealers run. If you're looking at very low funnel things, reasons to call a customer, we'd like the dealer to benchmark at about 30% of the people that they speak with. That answer is more in the mid-20s. If you take it across all outbound campaigns, including the people who haven't been in for over a year and such, that conversion rate is about 17 to 18% across our customers. So in that case the rate is doubled, but it's still about 50% better than your normal dealers converting on an outbound campaign.

Well, it seems to be imperative that you get these folks called back right away. Is there any indication of how long is too long? Do you need to call them back in 2 minutes, 10 minutes, an hour? What do you see there?

We're logging that data. I guess. I've got a guess I'm not going to make it for this call. Certainly that was 10 seconds of silence that felt like a really long time. Right. So for the customer who's waiting on a callback, the answer should normally be as soon as possible. But I'll, I'll follow back up on that one. It is, it's good for the dealer's pocketbook whether you have volley or not to call, call someone back. It's also good for the long term health of the business. And, and like I said, for you to keep the promise with your customers that you're going to take care of them after they service a vehicle. There isn't a single customer who was told when they bought a car, when you buy your car, service it here. But we're not going to answer the phone and we're not going to take care of you in service. They all have the opposite expectation. So you know, it's fundamental, you need to keep that promise.

They all have the opposite expectation, but also a lot of folks don't really expect it when it comes down to it. So if you are proactive with calling those people back. Some of the feedback that we've heard from, from, you know, our customers are that they've, they've, they have people call in to say, hey, you know, I'm, I'm amazed by the service that we've gotten. I can't believe that your agent took the time to call me back. So having good visibility on those and calling those people back is not just good business, but it's good customer relation, too.

Oh, yeah, for sure. By the way, I've never. I was almost sweating, waiting the 10 seconds of dead time. I don't know if it's 10 seconds. It felt forever. Remember, our customers don't want to wait too, so.

Well, I'm going to play it back and I'll tell you later, But I'm going to guess it was only about four seconds. So imagine what another, you know, six seconds would have been, Scott. I mean, short little topic, but a very, very crucial one. Any closing thoughts here?

No. No. Appreciate everyone joining us for the volley rally, and we'll talk to you next time.

Have a great day.