Getting Started in Centralizing Your BDC - Tully Williams

Hello everyone. Welcome back to another Volley rally. Today I am joined by Tully Williams, the parts and service director for the Nilo Auto Group. Tully, how are you doing today?

Doing great. Thanks so much for the invite. Super excited. I love Volley. I can't wait to dig in.

Well, we, we appreciate you and, and for, for those of you tuning in. We did not pay him to say that. We did not ask him to say that. Tully is a, is a, is a true, true, truly great partner to work with. So we, we have a very interesting topic here for you all. We hear all the time from prospects and folks who are looking at Volley that you either don't have a centralized BDC yet or maybe you're thinking of starting one or maybe you don't have anything for service bdc. And Tully with Nilo, they're a great example of someone who truly did not, I mean they're right where you are. They did not have anything in place for a centralized service bdc. So we're going to dive into that, that mindset of growing that, of building that. Before we do, Tully, can you tell everyone a little bit about the group? You know, how many stores do you guys have and what does it look like?

Fantastic. So the dealer company out in Sacramento, California is been in business, hundred and three years. Can you believe it? Unbelievable. Started and we have 10 rooftops in a body shop, mostly luxury brands. We have the oldest Porsche dealer and Audi dealer in the United States with the same dealer. We have two Porsches, two Audis, excuse me, two Porsches, one Audi, two BMWs, two Jag Land Rovers, Volvo, Acura, Volkswagen. And we have great brands to start with. And that's the reason why we've always talked about, you know, why do we need a bdc? How can we help our, our customers better? And that's how it all started together we have a really good group of guys and gals that run our store together. As we let the stores run themselves with the guidance of the corporation, it really helps us make sure we do the right decisions.

And Nilo is a very, very well known and like you said, it's an established old legacy brand out there. Before you started the, the bdc, what, what were the stores doing with service?

So everybody had a cashier, a call taker or two. We got rid of our cashiers and went to writers cashiering. So we turned them all kind of into service coordinators. And what happens is, is that busy stores like that, you know, you might have one, two or three based off your volume. Answer the Phones. And as you know, it's very difficult when you have volume of people calling in check status, which drives me crazy. And you have people calling in to make appointments, then what happens is that there's a lot of voicemails, there's a lot of hold ons and all these kind of things. And we noticed that, we saw that some stores were struggling horribly and some stores were just barely floating. Nobody was doing a good job. Now we were full of appointments because people kept on calling back. God bless every one of those people for doing that. But we were not handling our traffic well. And that's where we decided to do the bdc. And we did it in baby steps. But that's the reason why we did it, because the stores were not doing a great job. They were doing an okay job.

So that's the why of it. How long had you thought about this before you took the leap? Because you started about, about a year ago, towards the start of 2024. You know, what did that timeline look like?

Well, you know, I, I started the deal company, I've been here six years. You know, I mentioned a bdc, you know, when I first started, when I got here, you know, but you know, BDCs were not really common back then for small groups or, you know, it was, you know, this, this group has been around for so long, they're kind of stuck in their ways and you know, it wasn't something a higher priority because we weren't doing a bad job. But as we grew and our stores were getting bigger or selling more hours, we noticed that some stores were struggling. So my goal was to pick on one store to try it out and, and then move forward as we build in other stores. And of course it was a huge success and it went faster than we ever imagined.

So you guys started using Volley in May of last year. There was a little bit of time period before you made that switch and implemented Volley. What did the BDC look like initially?

That's funny. So let's just start. The first thing is that when you start it, when you, when you think about a bdc, you need to find the right manager. Carl Vickinshu is our greatest manager ever. Nice person, but where did I find him? I found him as a great service advisor in one of our stores that maybe wanted to take it to the next level to become a manager or something. And we took him in because our goal was not to have a good phone answer, but, but we need someone that understands fixed op service. And that's the reason I think Part of our success is, is that he has background in writing circles a lot of years. 2. He's also a very nice person. So the next thing is that we brought him in and we allowed him to pick one or two people. We picked on one store and what did we do? Excel spreadsheets with marker pen, right? And we'd get a list of people and we get a list from. We picked on our BMW store first. So we get the, we get the recall list, we get the telematics calls. We call people to remind them to come in. And of course we had calls that were routed through our phone system back to the BDC agents and it worked okay. We used xtime as our other product and they have somewhat of a BDC product. It basically just brings it up and tells you what's in there. And it worked. But the problem was that it was not scalable and it was very labor intensive and this was not a long term solution. So for success, the success that we were having with both of our BMW stores before we brought on Volley was working. We saw the benefit for it for our stores, which was a good thing. So the next piece was as I saw Scott on the Big Stops roundtable, I'm like, dude, this is the guy. And what I did is I, after I did it, I call up Ted Ings and say, ted, I need to get a hold of Scott. I got his phone, every call of Scott and I would say that I would call him a personal friend. And we have, you know, had a great relationship. So he showed me how the product worked, showed me the scalability, which is what I was really worried about. And the flexibility we had at the store. And then all of a sudden when we put that in, all of a sudden it was like, oh my God, we don't have check sheets anymore, we don't have marker pens, we don't have spreadsheets, we don't have 50 million screens on trying to make it all happen. Volley handled that and also Volley handled our volume when it comes in. It can manage our invite incomes in. So if someone goes to a voicemail or gets put on hold, Volley makes sure that we call those people back. Because what happens usually is voicemails get answered at the end of the day or the next following day. Right? Because you're busy answering phone calls, you don't have time to look at that volley there in turn now and making sure we get those people back within 20 to 30 minutes max. Other thing is, is that our outbound campaign, you know, we had Outbound campaigns set up through X time and through, you know, manufacturers of lists. And we had all these lists. So you go to this person's desk and what he had, he had paper everywhere and they're making their checking, marking boxes off does not work. And we don't really have trackability. We know how many appointments they're making, but we really don't know how many phone calls are handling and how they're doing with that. And. And when we went to Bali, oh my God, it was like, oh, look at this. We have trackability, which we believe in. We want to be transparent with all of our teams because they want to see how well they're doing. And I like trackability. To say thank you, it's not, you need to work harder. And what we found is that, wow, team is doing an incredible job. And as we brought on the third store, we hired another person that was usually from that store or a person that wanted to join the team. We didn't really want an outsider. Too many. We do have some. And we started building the team slowly because we wanted to make sure it worked and not grew too fast. And that to me was the biggest success, was us starting slow, having the greatest software, which is volley. Can't say enough good things about it. And two is having a great leader, Carl, at our beating season.

So you started small and did you pick, I hate to ask this question, but it comes up more than you would think and it's, I guess it's a fair question. Did you start with a high performing, good store, good teams, or did you think, okay, we're going to pick one of our lower stores, build out the process, improve that store and then bring the others on board.

Great question. We picked the store that had the most phone calls. That was a complete cluster. And BMW is our largest store at the time. And you know, and they have a million phone calls and they were struggling answering them in a lot of voicemails and they needed it super fast. So that was the first store we did was our BMW store. And then as we got that dialed in and realized, oh my God, this is working, what a concept. On paper, we brought in our second BMW store together as a combo and that really helped with doing Boston. They call in, they would, they would be the same store, the same brand. It was easy for us to manage, but it took us about, I think it was about the third month, second month, we brought in the second BMW story, which really helped. And then we started to bring another person in. So now we have three or four people in the back making sure that we're answering those great phone calls and making those great outbound calls.

And now you have all of the stores totally onboarded. They're all living in Valley every day. All of your agents. How does the BDC team look today?

It's on fire. I just want to tell you, we. I am so impressed on what we've got in. You know what we. What the first thing was is outbound calls to us was a big deal. When we started the bdc, it wasn't about inbounds as much as, yes, we wanted to help the store handle that inbound traffic, but we really wanted to make those outbound calls. I think those are the biggest success that we've had. And when you look at our outbound metrics, which I couldn't really measure, is that we look at, we call for our red or our declines, we call on disappointments, we're calling on telematics, we're calling on. On recalls, and we're calling on people that need to show up for their next service, which is, to me, the biggest thing. I don't think people really look at emails much anymore. And mail. I think that if a human being, not an AI product, a human being calls you up and says your next service, blank will get a better result. And what happened? Oh, my God, we make all these phone calls. We're at 14 or 15,000 phone calls today, right? And what do we do? We do a great job getting the person on the phone, right? The phone call doesn't come across as spam. It talks about what store we're from, right? And we answer. And you probably know better than I do, but I think we get about a 40 to 50% answer rate. And then if I get them on the phone, I make appointments 40 to 50% of the time, which, you know, Scott said, tully, that's crazy. I said, dude, we want to be the best at it, but if you do it right, nice people on a valid reason why they should come back say no. And what we found out is that is exactly what happened. And that's not one of our stores. That's all of our stores. That's the average for the group. So some are a little bit higher, some are a tad lower. But the goal is we're doing a great job getting people to answer the phone. Then we send a text and email, which we could not do without volley before, to thank them and tell them what we did. If we even leave a voicemail. And then a lot of times the people will respond back through email or text and we can handle that appointment through Volley, which is awesome. And of course it interfaces with our extent product. Next thing was our inbounds. You know, our inbounds. Our inbound, press 1 for appointment. You know what the biggest problem we have is? I want to talk to a human, I don't want to talk to a robot. And people sometimes were scared to hit the one button. So that as we had a great meeting last night, we talked to our sale, our g, our service managers about how do, what do we say about it? And it was like, you want to Talk to press 1 to talk to a live appointment agent or we're trying to figure out the right wording because we got to tell them it's a live person. And then sometimes when they answer, the first thing that comes out of the mouth is this a real person. It's so funny. And, and we've had great success with our inbounds and, and our inbounds, you know, we're answering those rates at probably almost 100% right. We have enough team members back there to make sure we do it. And then too is that we're making appointments 90% of the time on the phone call. We think about it, we get a lot of calls that are not, as you all know, I just want to talk to somebody. I'll hit every button until I hit somebody. And of course the BDC is there to help and we help manage those times like that. We're doing a very good job. So our ins and out bounds, I believe are incredible.

You and I had another conversation a couple of months ago on the Fix Ops roundtable and one of the things that you said that really stuck with me is you, you kind of disagree. You know, there's a lot of marketing and verbiage out there about how email and SMS and all of these non human touches are the way to drive service business. And you, you said on the Fixed Ops roundtable, I think it's all wrong. I think people want to talk with a real person and I'm going all in on outbound. Is that still your mindset?

100%. I don't think if you sit there and think about it, you know, do you want to talk to a robot right now? Let's think about the biggest, the best robot in the planet is Amazon, right? I can talk to Alexa and ask her a million questions she's going to answer, but when you call their support line, you're talking to a robot and then what happens? The Robot gets confused and forwards you to a human being that fixes the problem. I just want to bypass that. And I want a human answering my phone now after hours. If there's a product that can help us with some questions, great. But overall, I'm not an AI fan. Right. Phone. I think they're a backup at best. I think humans do an incredible job for us. I also believe. One thing also I do is that I. All my no shows, I take them out of the appointments. So my show rate will always be 100%. Why do I do that? I'm trying to open up spots and we start calling people up. I can't make it today because. Can I reschedule? Yes or no? We reschedule it and we fix it. I can't come in because I'm not coming. Okay, great. I delete the appointment. We want to make sure that our appointment schedule is clean and honest. So part of our job is that we delete a lot of our no shows. We want to keep our inventory clean.

So once you got past the initial implementation of olla, you got all the stores onboarded. You know, it sounds to me like there were a lot of things that you planned for in terms of improving your processes. Were there any advantages to centralizing that you didn't anticipate?

I was dreaming of it working perfectly. Right. And I talked to a couple stories that I have successful. I got. I got some references from you guys and. And what they did and, you know, they told me all their problems, of course. Right. And their successes and their big successes was that it sounded like me. Is that they did not have the metrics or the success rate of what do they expect per person. And to me is that I talked with Carl. I said, carl, we want to measure per person and have their pay plans tied to that. Because we expect certain responsibilities, certain things we want from each one of our call takers. And what we decided is, is that we all pay them on an inbound call. And we'll pay them on an appointment made if they hit their forecast. Forecast like I have an hours and forecast as we have an appointment. So what we look at is each person has to do 40 appointments a day. I want to make 40 appointments a day, every day they work. And that is 100% of their forecast. 40 sounds a big number. I was worried because we're, you know, we're experimenting here. And we found that 40% works just fine. I don't have anybody at 150%. But my goal is that I just Want you to be 100, I want you to be 105. Right. And what we found is that they're doing it month in and month out. We've really not had a problem when we went to this plan. 100% is that they are making great appointments right now. We do look at, make sure they don't have, you know, a bunch of bogus appointments. Now for us, we look for that kind of thing and we check those out because we're calling all those people and we choose that on our inbound calls. They get paid a little bit there, but our goal is to make an appointment. So now when they say, hey, can you take all these calls for us? The store says, what does our call taker say? Absolutely, because they're interested in doing what making people happy and making an appointment. And having a appointment forecast to me was a big, big deal.

One of the perceived downsides of centralizing for a group like yours that you hear is, you know, I want to be able to have consistent customer experiences for my Toyota store. And, you know, what they need is different than my Honda, you know, et cetera. Right? How did that work for you guys?

So I'm going to give Carl all the credit. And what he does is he assigns a primary and a secondary person for each store. And what they do every month is that Carl and that person goes to the store face to face, not on a zoom call, not on a teams call or a phone call. We go to the store and we talk about them, we talk about what they want, and we have, we have a sheet of cheat sheets for all the stores and everybody goes there. So our goal is, is to make sure that person that's managing that store knows the advisors, knows the managers, knows the parts people, knows the store and they build that relationship. So then you don't have this artificial. Oh, yeah, George is a really nice guy. Who the hell is George? Right? They know the service, they know the team there. They know the store not just once, but monthly, if not twice a month, based on their needs. Right? We want to make sure that they're completely involved. So they, they're there at our service writer meetings at store levels, right? They're there to talk to them about what they can do better and listen to. And I think that is our biggest win that Carl has done is those store visits by store and their primary person. And Bali does a great job for this cause. It helps us manage that.

You yourself are not in the BDC every day. You have a great guy with Carl there managing how do you feel Volley has helped you manage and as well as, you know, the other executives within, within Neela?

Well, I believe measurements is everything. As you can see behind me, I have two, these two TV sets. I have 64 television sets around the Neelo company. I have a website that we manage that all of our people with fixed and variable can look at. And we do the same thing with our, with our BDC team. They need to know where they are today, how great are they doing. And if we go out there and tell everybody how well they're doing every day, how many phone calls, how many inbounds, how many outbounds, the appointment percentage, percentage, how many appointments do they create, how many appointments do they create for the entire group? Right, right. Because some stores, it'll do a little bit here and there, but the goal is that we make 99 or 90% of all the appointments for the group. And we tell them every day out of as we have done that in our fixed doctor. We sell hours. I tell everybody every day how many hours we sold in the BDC department. Guess what we do? We tell them how many appointments they did today and where they are on their appointment forecast. We tell the entire team how well they're doing. So now it's not a super secret club. It's a club that everybody can look at and say thank you. So now when I have my weekly Fit stops teams, most of our stores do what. Thank you, Carl. Thank you, Carl, for how. Thank you. You're doing a great job. Right. That's the biggest moment.

One of the, we, you know, when we do these, these calls and the, in these videos, we always get on and we talk for a couple of minutes before we start recording. And, and you shared something with me from just, I think you said it was last Friday you went out to dinner and, and you had a story about how the, how the stores and the service managers kind of viewed the bdc. You want to share that again?

Fantastic. So it was actually last night we had our service manager dinner, which we have on a bi monthly basis. And you know, we go through process and stuff. And then of course, as you know, phones are the worst thing ever to manage at a store. And you know, we, you know, everybody has the stories. We just demand excellence and we want everybody to be green. So the question I had is, is that we have a voicemail problem, right? What store does it? Right. And the goal was, like I said to everybody, do you want Carl to handle all of the overflow traffic at your store? And they all yelled yes. And then the next question was, is that after hours calls that go into a new abyss that probably no one ever calls back. Do you want Carl to handle all your after hours calls and they'll call those people back in the morning 100% guaranteed? Yes. And that to me is the biggest compliment to Carl is they know it will be handled. The nice thing about Volley also does, if there's ever a concern, guess what you do. You record everything. What a concept. So when the customer says, well, the BDC agent said, and pull that information out, you let the manager realize that it's probably not the industry. If it was, it's a learning environment. We apologize. We'll call the customer up and say we're sorry. Is that we hold everybody accountable. And what happens then is our stores appreciate the BDC and now they're begging for the bdc, which is a huge part.

Is there anything with your centralization for the service B2C that you'd have done differently?

I would have started faster. I was scared to death. I think that's part of the goodness. But I think that the first couple months we started slow, small. One store went to two stores. As soon as we went to three or four. I should have said, let's do more people. You don't want to do it before you hire the people we did is that we drug it out over a period of six months. If I had to do it over again, I would have been all up on Bali 100, all the stores by a month ago. That's not really a bad thing. You know, it's.

No, no. I mean, oh, man. My learning lesson is we did too good. I should have got done even better. You know, I mean, I. I think, I think there's a lot worse problems to have there.

So 100 on that. And I think the success is, is when the storm, you know, it's.

No, no. I mean, oh, man. My learning lesson is we did too good. I should have done. You know, I mean, I. I think, I think there's a lot worse problems to have there.

So 100% on that. And I think the success is, is when the stores are begging or pleading, can you help us? That's the ultimate problem to your bdc. BDC made another dental appointment. Well, they promised it was going to be a dollar and it's $4 trillion. We don't have these problems. We also want to make sure that whatever the BDC says comes from the service manager and their tuning. So they have a cheat sheet of Everything for pricing. We're working on getting our service pricing guides dialed into the service. Agents can do intelligence. We are not going to over and under promise to anybody. That is always a challenge and that's the reason why store visits are so important to have to make sure we don't over or under promise because what is the biggest problem we have in appointments? Well, they promise me a lot of car and that is the devil. Right. And that's the biggest challenge. So making sure that the BDC understands how that loaner car program works so we don't over promise loaner party which is always.

Well I've definitely taken up enough of your time here. Really appreciate it and and I think we've done a good job of highlighting where your mindset was in starting and implementing and all the way through to where we are today. Are there any final thoughts that you'd have to share for a dealership or a dealer group that is considering volley for their service?

BDC first is you need to start with a great manager. A great manager that understands the fixed ops department. That might be I think a good service advisor or a good service manager that wants to come down is a great example. You might have a great call taker that does a good job but a lot of times they don't understand the ins and outs of the fixed ops that works. I would recommend a great manager also. That person needs to be calm and collective. All you're doing is talking to customers as you know. Then after you do that then the next best piece is that if you're taking over a store is that you want to take people from the store as you as you bring the store on. They don't need BDC agents or call takers at the store level. Don't go out there and hire a whole bunch of new people and those poor people are going to get repurposed or let go is go out there and ask them to come into your team. That helps you get started quickly. Learn Bali inside and out. The more you understand, you know with your performance advisor first emails is that you know they have weekly calls and Carl learned so much in the first couple months about how Bali worked and that what probably made the difference. You know a lot of times you buy software and you use like 5%. We use 100 of all and that helps our team be more successful. So one, pick the right manager that knows the business. Not knows the business of calls but knows the business of fixed. Two, if you're going to start one, try to hire people from your stores that are successful at stores and bring them in. Great call takers. Have a plan for pay based off the performance that drives the goal to write appointments. Then lastly, of course, having a great partner like yourselves is a huge piece. We could not do it without the volleys.

Well everyone, Tully Williams, Parts and Service Director for the Nelo Company, an incredible auto group from out in California. They're awesome to work with. And I don't know when this will be posted, but at the time of recording, we're going to be out there and seeing you guys in person next next month, which will be great. So really appreciate you taking the time today. Tully.

No problem. Thank you all. Appreciate it very much.

Have a great day.