Fixed Ops Roundtable: Live at NADA 2026 ft. Scott Davis and Tully WIlliams

Welcome back to the Fixed Ops roundtable. I'm Sarah Vantine here with Ted Ings. Today we have the Volley panel and Ted BDC has been on the minds of lots in our industry.

Volley is making tremendous strides in our industry. So honored to have Scott Davis with us here today, joined by Tully Williams from the Nelo company on the west coast. Gentlemen, welcome to the Fixox run.

Thank you very much.

Thanks for having me.

Scott, great things happening at Valley. I understand. Also a new product has been introduced. I don't know how much you could tell us about that, but eager to hear about that.

Yeah, sure, yeah, it's been a great show so far. We just rolled out a. A conversational intelligence tool and it, and what it does, it listens to every call and then, you know, AI scores the call. We built it based on 160 million appointments that have been done in Valley that were all hand confirmed by people. And it's great. It'll alert the dealer if they've missed an appointment, if the AI thinks they should have made it, if they've got a really angry customer, if there was tomfoolery, if I can use the word tomfoolery by the agent, maybe the disposition didn't match. It's a great product. It'll be very useful. It fits right in our mission to deliver communication products for the dealership to make it easy to communicate with our customers and our dealers have asked for it. We're super excited.

Tully, how does this play into the Nilo company?

It's fantastic. We are using that tool right now in our BDC calls and it's made a big difference. Where our manager Carl can now review those calls automatically, where he can only target the ones that he wants to target. He's alerted for ones that need his attention right away. But also we get to use that data set to say thank you, you're doing a great job of doing things the right way. We which I like the best part of this whole thing. And I am super excited that he is now offering that to all of our calls. And of course we are signing up for sure to track our service writers and our call takers of the Strix ops department. So we are super excited about this new product. But also I want to talk about his BDC software which you introduced me to, my good friend Scott. And we have really taken advantage and I think people don't realize that emails and texts don't work. They think they work and everybody's out here selling it. But honestly, the phone call is what Makes it happen every day. And because of Volley and helping us out when we have our campaigns for our reminder campaigns, instead of sending an email out or text out, we are calling every one of those people, our great Nelo customers and we have an answer rate, they're answering the phone at 80% plus and there is a, out of those 80% there's a 90% chance that I'm going to get an appointment. That is incredible when people are saying hey, we'll send an email out. And I think Scott has some statistics that are just mind blowing that doesn't work. So Scott, thank you. And we utilize the software and we are super successful with it.

They're a great bdc, they add a lot of science to it. Volley is a call, email and SMS platform. There's 20 million phone calls in it a month, 16 million SMS's and about 10 million emails. And usually those are done in conjunction with calls. But just one of the stats on SMS that really shocked us is about between 10 and 11% of the SMS get responded to. And a third of those are optics where if you as someone just the average dealer, average Chevy store doing active service, if they have a four attempt search engine campaign labunded answer rate of 35% over all the attempts including callbacks, you can actually speak with 70 out of 100. Tully's a little bit different cat just because he's a little bit twisted and he eats a little. He does super good. But we've had some big learnings ourselves here because some of our assumptions, those communications are mainly meant to support, you know, engaging with people personally through the phones.

Those are big numbers. I mean huge numbers.

Isn't it eye opening though? I think that, you know, we kind of got away from the phone.

Yeah.

And, and then all these people are trying to sell because it's easy and then we really got down to it. What Scott brought up is that it really doesn't work that well and we get back to the human element. You know, I don't want an AI agent to call, I want a human being to call. And we're finding out that we have some great success, I would say massive success by having a bdc. That BDC was the best thing we did last year, bar none.

I think a lot of it is just when you have manual processes and tools it's easy to lose track of your time and not be efficient. You know we need people to be working 50 minutes of every hour. They don't need B2C jobs are hard but if they Just, Just engage with the customer for 50 minutes an hour. The numbers that you can do are incredible. Your retention will go up. It's a way just to keep them busy and productive and to make sure they're doing what executes the dealer strategy.

And I think that with the software he has out, now that we monitor those calls, we're keeping an eye on everybody because it gets monotonous. But I think it makes a really good. BDC is having a really good manager and having a team effort. It makes everybody happy and excited and have goals to set. And now we have ability to listen to those calls. We. Which we've been doing, but now I think with the service rider side, which is probably our biggest challenges, what's happening out there now we can listen to see how we're selling. And we. I know the measurement of we're selling at 70% of everything we ask for. But, you know, how is that conversation going? How can we intervene if there's a negative sentiment on a call right away like that minute? So I think that we have a lot of good things coming down the pike. We're super excited.

Yeah, I'm excited, too. I love it.

So, Scott, it's amazing to hear all the success that Tully and the Nilo company is having with Volley. But, you know, for our listeners that are out there today that may have not gotten started, maybe they have a great BDC team already, or maybe they're just starting to think about the implications of really wrapping up and having a better strategy for their phone calls. What are some of the next steps to get started?

Well, with or without Volley?

With Volley.

Okay with Volley.

Scott.

Okay with Volley. I had some good things they could do without Volley. But then go to volley.com, there's, you know, forms you can fill out on the website. My email, scottalli.com, i'll call you back. You can guarantee I'll call you back.

But one thing I want to think about is if you're thinking about a bdc, if it's one person, two person or three person, and I was talking to a store yesterday that has one and a half people answering the phones. A Volley product can help you so much for that small of one. You know, we have 14 at our store, but I think one or two, it still makes a difference because you know how they're doing. And we get to measure that and then show the success of what's happening by making those appointments. That's the power of volley. That's really the power of A BDC at your store to drive more appointments and drive more revenue.

I think. I know we're wrapping up here. And Tully's better at this than me, obviously. He's very seasoned. You know, one of our mottos is to help the dealer play offense. I think it's stressful just to wait around and see who's going to show up. No dealer has a retention rate of 100%.

I have 71.

You should go and get the business. If you. Even at the little guys, if they can make the 100 right phone calls a day and drive an extra 10 outbound appointments coming in. Because every outbound appointment, either they weren't coming in or they weren't coming in as fast. And if you could speed up the database, your numbers are incredible, too. So we can help the little guys, too. They don't need to be biggies like Tully.

But I also think right now, you know, BDC is not taking inbounds. I want you to think about BDC as an outbound maker. Outbound is where we did the best success with, and we're having a great success. The inbounds are freebie calls.

And Tully, outbound is the nirvana. That's where everybody wants to go.

100%.

That's right.

Yeah. The inbound just guarantees you've trapped 100% of their time.

100%.

So. All right, thanks.

Scott Davis from Valley. Thank you so much. Congratulations to you, Congratulations to Tully on all that you're doing. And I'm so glad that Valley's a big part of what you're doing.

It's a massive part. Thank you.

All right, I'm here with Sarah Van Tine. We're at the Fixed Ops Roundtable and Sarah and I are going to be right back.

Awesome.

Thank you. Genius. Dolly here.