Focusing on Inbound with JulieAnn Falls from Fred Beans

Foreign.

Today. Welcome to another session of the volley rally. You're stuck with me again. Jake is, is, is on another business and I'm very excited. Today I have Julianne Falls, BDC manager with the Fred Beans Organization. How are you doing, Julianne?

Very well, thank you for asking. How are you?

Great. I think everyone's going to really enjoy this little talk today. The learnings and, and the great job they're doing in this bdc. There's, there's a lot to take away from it. One of the reasons that I thought of having you guys on was from day one you guys had just a pathological focus on, on inbound calls and doing a good job from there. What, how'd you do it? What strategies did you put in place? Etc.

When we first began, there was no BDC that existed at the time. We were using a virtual BDC after hours and for overflow. But really we started this from scratch. Some of the things that we did, we. I immediately send out a questionnaire to all of my service managers when they're coming on board. Gives me the basic information, but it's always a good launching point and that allows me to make info pages for each dealership. So there is a spreadsheet we have with a tab for every dealership and all of their policies, procedures and even like their outside vendors and scheduling from there. I also do quarterly updates and I send a quarterly survey to every one of my, my service managers to make sure that we are staying on top of all of their information and that we have current information as well. So with the, with the inbound focus, when we first started, that was really all we were doing. We didn't take on outbound until I had a little bit better of a foundation to build upon. So we spent the first few months really just focused on that inbound calls, scripting, tweaking what we needed to tweak here and there to, to make a better customer experience. And then we were able to open up and expand from, from there. So.

When I'd come and visit you guys, I was always amazed. You guys have the screen that shows calls waiting. All the agents are trained to watch the, the screen. They're all very conscientious. They, they just do a great job. And just so everyone knows when, when Valley started with Fred Beans, they had nine stores in six agents and, and they were all running pretty hard. Now they've got 16 agents and they've got 22 stores on board. So they've done a really good job with that and, and you guys do train to watch that board and, and there is a huge sense of urgency there.

Absolutely. We have three big screen TVs around the call center that displays everybody's status, whether on a call, you know, how long they've been on that call, how many appointments they've made. We're all familiar with the dashboard and we throw that live dashboard up on all three TV screens so they see that queue at all times. Nothing for us to, you know, kind of shout out, hey guys, there's two in the queue. Just to make them, you know, kind of reset everybody and get them back in their focus. But those TV screens, part of our week long training is breaking down that live dashboard and showing everybody the different stats that are displayed, also setting up those expectations for them. For instance, missed calls. We do web confirmations for all of our dealerships and every agent is assigned a rooftop. So if that is your rooftop for a web confirmation, you go into your missed call log and anything for that rooftop, you are responsible to call back. So we're able to keep that drop rate very, very reasonable by utilizing that as well. Now that we have the adjusted agent rate, which I love, we can see those missed calls and the effect of us calling those people back there.

There's really two components to running a BDC for a dealership. The first and foremost, the most important thing is taking care of the business that the customers are trying to give you guys. Just to give everyone an idea here, when they started, we could tell they were massively short of people and they had a 6 to 7% drop rate, which is still very good relative to the average dealership. I just looked today, it's 1.79%. So one of the focuses that, and I'm glad you, you touched on that because one of the focuses that you guys have always had, even when you were short staffed, was to not let a single missed call go uncalled by the end of the day. Do it as good as any, any customers we have. Anything else withinbound really that you want to talk about how you guys really do a good job on that?

We, so we spend a lot of time and I have an assistant manager that we, we recently brought on, which has been a huge help in statistics the way that they are and keeping everybody on the same page. So she kind of manages the agents, I kind of manage the back end office stuff, campaigns and so forth. But having her. And we train to recognize call drivers first off so we can head any issues off at the past, so to speak, recognizing trends for people calling in and tweaking the processes as we needed to sort of starting from scratch. We really didn't have, you know, a lot of history to kind of build from. So immediately if I have. We have a call driver, for instance, a recall was announced on the news this morning. You know, we make sure to pull all of the information that we can and get it to the agents right away. It, it allows better call handling, shorter call handling. We utilize management tos. So if somebody is stuck, either availability, pricing question or an escalated customer, those immediately go to my assistant, gets my agent back onto the next call. We utilize email whenever we can't get a hold of somebody. And then just of course staffing and making sure that I have the right staff at the right times of day when we have the, the call drives.

I love Volley. Obviously I'm biased, but Volley is meant to have great manager help. Great managers run great businesses and I hope everyone's seeing it's more than just rolling out the ball and, and having, you know, having your folks take inbound calls. Just think of the, the system and process and putting in place. Well done. It's just awesome. Couple other things and we'll wrap it up today. This has been a couple weeks ago was your one year anniversary on Volley, so. And it's gone fast. Any, any key learnings for the, for the first year. Anything you would do differently to get going?

Yes, I would have started with Volley. We went through a different phone system before we found Volley and it is night and day with what we've done and we love just having the availability, me being able to have my hands in the controls, what I'm turning on, what I'm turning off as far as campaigns or even, you know, dealerships. It. Volley has made my life, my assistant's life so much easier because I, I have a reference to everything I have. I love when I can pull a call if there's been a problem at a dealership and they say, hey, you know, did this cause what happened? I have all of that at my fingertips and it has built a lot of trust with the BDC to my service managers because I think we, we come to find in this industry in general, the BDC and the service departments sometimes function separately and, and you don't want to fight against each other. Right. So having all of these tools available and being able to pull calls and send calls or, or statistics builds that trust with my service managers to the point now a year later I'm able to call a service manager and say hey, you're having a tire sale. I'm going to pull your declined services and pull all tires for you to. For next month. And kind of, they trust me now to make those calls and to make decisions for them. And it's really based around all the information that's housed within Volley. I'm able to harbor that trust and build on that trust. I think it's amazing and I can tell you because for the first six months we struggled with a different phone system and nothing was easy. Nothing was a good experience for the customer or us. So things have, things have been night and day with taking you guys on and I look forward. I've enjoyed actually watching you guys grow as well. And one thing that I always say is if we have a suggestion, I love to see it come into fruition. You guys listen to us. We're out in the field. You know, if we're dealing with an issue, there's always an opportunity and you guys step right in. I love the updates because I've watched a lot of the things we've talked about be updated and implemented and so I look forward to growing with you guys as well.

One other thing that's, that's is. Is pretty unique to you guys and, and we have some new BDCs out here. There's a push to bring BDCs back into the dealership. Like I said, when you guys started, you had nine stores in Bali. You said when you started, you started with three stores. What was your strategy to bring on 13 more stores? Because like you said, it takes a while to build up the trust with the service manager. You know, it's. In some ways your boss is Mike and Your boss is 26 fixed ops directors at these stores. It's hard. So talk about onboarding new stores and the processes you put in place.

So a lot of it again is those questionnaires and quarterly updates. I also visit the sites. When somebody starts with us, we send them out to the dealerships to meet everybody as well. So now we have faces with names and we're not just somebody behind a phone call. That has helped a lot, but really it is as we have grown in dealerships, we have grown as agents as well. So as our skills get stronger, were able to bring on. So I only have one holdout at this time because Monday we, we are at 22 dealerships out of the 23 and the 23rd will come by summer. But so we've done a lot of, of interacting and proving what we're doing and the fruition of It. I will say that this past January was the biggest January in service that Fred has ever experienced. And a lot of that I want to attribute to my 16 agents and what they do and, you know, coming to work every day and plowing through nine hours straight of just talking to people. And we continue to grow and set those records. I don't know that there's a secret necessarily to bringing on additional dealerships, but what helps with us is, you know, I have six Ford dealerships, so if I'm already doing four and I've got this success rate, it's very easy for me to then, you know, bring in another, which is actually what we're doing. Monday, we're bringing in another Ford. But our reputation kind of speaks for itself at this point, and I love that we get. We get compliments across the board. We have the trust of the upper management. We have the trust now of the service managers. And, you know, I'm starting to see a lot more. We're able to open up capacity at different dealerships because we have kept organized and kept on top of things, so they're able to work on their end, open up bays and open up capacity based on the demand that they see. So all exciting all around, we're watching our departments grow out in the service or out in the rooftops. We're growing here. We opened a second department, let's see, at the beginning of March. So not only are we answering calls and making outbound calls, but we now have a second department that is taking closed work orders and setting their next appointments proactively. So I'm curious to see what this looks like in six months. You know, our inbound call volume should go down because these people, most of our customers, will have appointments, and that means a bigger focus on outbound. So I'm very excited to see where this takes us in six months.

That's great. Just a testament to focusing on. On the right behaviors, the right processes in place. I hope everyone liked hearing it. It really it. You guys just do a great job and we really appreciate you being on Volley. I hope everyone enjoyed listening to it. Any parting shots, Julianne?

No, just thank you very much for supporting us and being there for us as we've grown. And again, just looking forward to what, where the next year takes us.

That's great. Thanks for being on.

Thank you.