How Recall Masters Doubled Agent Efficiency

See here, does it say there we go?

Yep, there we go. Okay. Welcome to this week's volley rally, everyone. Appreciate you joining us today. I have Tony Glaser from Recall Masters joining me. Tony, appreciate the time.

Happy to be here.

So today we want to talk about something unique that Tony has done to motivate his agents. But before we dive into what he calls his WINS program, Tony, can you tell everyone a little bit cause you're not a dealer, can you tell a little bit about the types of calls you're making with your agents?

Yeah, absolutely. For those of you who are not familiar with Recall Masters, one of our products is direct to a dealer product where we reach out on behalf of auto dealerships to consumers in the area to let them know if they have an open recall. So we reach out via traditional mail, email, sms and call sometimes to let people know, let consumers know, hey, you have a recall, would you like to come into our dealership and take care of it? So I manage the communications product and do a lot of work especially with like SMS and email and inbound calls.

Awesome. So let's talk a little bit about the WINS program and how that works. So first off, what's a win?

What's a win? A win, you know, whatever you're doing in whatever industry you have, you know, you want to get people and your agents or your team to behave a specific way to. And for us it was to have a solid communication with consumers. So we, you know, we wrote out what is the criteria of a win, put a ranking system together, you know, where do we want people to be. We did a one through five rating. So one one and two needs improvement. Three is kind of where we want to set the stage standard. Four is a win. You know, that's like, hey, that's where we want to get to. And five is a unicorn that we always strive for. We haven't found it yet, but boy, have we come close. So what, what that looks like for us is, you know, our, our gold standard usually is just, you know, the basics of what you'd expect. You answer properly, use the right shortcuts, which is the term for volley, which is, you know, pre written scripts, provide, you know, the different services, ask the right questions. Right. But for a win for us is we looked at, well, what are the things that would make us go above and beyond that we'd really be proud to share with our clients. That includes overcoming objections, taking someone who's negative and making them feel positive, providing special needs if they need it, and then we Took it another step further because we believe in being human and that people want to speak with humans. So we wanted to make sure that compassion and empathy are demonstrated. Well, when those, you know, when there's an opportunity and even a positive rejection, Even if someone's rejecting the service that we're offering, we still want to leave a positive impression. So that way we, you know, build brand loyalty that our clients. Basically, we say to our team, if a consumer were to go into the dealership and show the SMS communication or the call or whatever, would we be proud of it? And on top of that, it's all about getting the behaviors we want and making people feel good about the job. If I had to, I put myself in their shoes. If I had to sit there and write the same scripts over and over, it would. I don't know. I want to feel human. I want to feel this connection, and it makes it fun. So the wins program was a way to get the behaviors that we want for my agents, while at the same time, how do you address the errors? How do you address, we call them areas of opportunity. What. What do you do there? And if you are only focusing on the negative, it can get really a bummer real quick. And I don't think it creates the morale that we're looking for. So how do we do it? Well, we reframe it. We're looking for WINS all the time, and so we can talk about how a conversation didn't get to where it needed to be in a positive frame. And on top of that, we have. I got authorized an incentive program. You know, I got a discretionary fund that I can use to incentivize our team and to do that. So that's the skinny.

Yeah. That's awesome. And can you talk a little bit about. You gave me some examples before we hopped on here of what a potential win would be versus not a win. Can you go over those for everyone?

Yeah, yeah, sure. I mean, when we started the program and when we. Especially when we're building up a new call center, the standard, what we have, what we'll call three in my rating system, would be a certain level. Right. And you try to get your agents to do that. Right. So. And then if you want to have them step up and raise that level, which we did, by the way, we started with what was a three when we first started now would be not consider that because we were able to improve our behavior. So what that may look like is, let's say someone calls in and we want just the basics, right? Oh, we're trying to get people to ask, is there any additional. While we have your vehicles or anything else you'd like us to look at? So we want that to be done. So we make that. Hey, if you say that, that becomes a three plus or whatever. Incentivize them, and then they get a little bit of money for it. We train that behavior, and then that becomes the standard to where we don'. Need to incentivize that anymore because we've locked that in and we're going to go to the next step. And one that we're very proud of is the human approach. And it's worked great. Like when we're working with sdc, which is a Subaru or whatever, it really matches their love promise. And they've been very stoked about how we communicate with our. With the consumers on their behalf. One example that always stands out to me is when, you know, someone will reach out and say, hey, you know, hey, John, you have a, you know, recall in your vehicle, jet come in, and someone will say, oh, this isn't John. This is, you know, his wife or daughter or something. He passed away. A lot. A lot of people are a bot or something would say, oh, well, if you have another vehicle and like to come in now, we say, you got to pause there and say, I'm really sorry to hear that. You know, I hope. Hope you're doing all right. That's. That's tough. And there's been other times where there's been more. I'm a new father. I have our team escalate. I want them to ask questions. I want to say, hey, if there's a unique opportunity, escalate it. So someone's like, I want to test the drive's vehicle. Have a kid. I was like, oh, I got a K too. And I was able to jump in there and talk for a minute. If someone offers a personal detail, you have to respond in kind. That's what we do. And we found it to be effective because it allows the agents to feel human, to be more engaged. And when you have an incentive program, every conversation is an opportunity to make a little extra cash. But a word about incentives, if I may. One thing I've learned. I don't know if you ever. I had a book a while ago was like Freakonomics or something, and they talked about incentives and how they can actually reduce productivity. So if you're just folding paper airplanes, I think that was the example they gave. And it's, how many paper airplanes can you fold in an Hour. That's a good way to say, okay, if you fold more, you get more. In our industry, in our team, you don't get to choose which conversations you get. Some people are just like not interested, whatever. So when you have an incentive program that's based on getting appointments for that, it makes it really tough. Cause it can stress you out. Because meanwhile the person next to you is getting the appointment, one you're like, I had no control over, that stresses you out. So we made it. So there's teamwork, you know, every. If one person gets a win, everyone gets a bonus. And we want to, you know, keep layering on that. And we've tried different ones. We tried it where you get a multiplier. It's individual. We've tried different things because you always got to try, look at the numbers, use data driven results. And when we started the wins program, we were about 3.5% appointment rate for all the communications. That includes the data, the bad data or just someone saying stop or whatever. Now we average easy every month over 6%. So we've more than doubled our appointment rate using this program. And the agents like it. We like it because it gets the behaviors that we want and we can use it to our advantage.

Well, morale is higher. The agents are making more appointments, so you're happier. How are you tracking this? How does Volley help you track your wins?

Oh, well, you know, it's been fun working with Volley because we have asked for a lot of functionalities and you guys have been great about, hey, we can try to work that in there. And it's been really helpful for when we can go back and look at the dispositions. You know, we use that. We're, we do a lot of this. This team is mostly sms. So for SMS program, we can look at the dispositions that we set, which is kind of. I don't know if everyone's familiar with that term, but yeah. So for the dispositions that we set, we can go back and look and analyze them. Because QA is everything in call center services. It's about always looking at the conversations and trying to improve them. So we can go back now and look at the conversations, filter them by disposition. One of the cool things that we do, and I'm proud of this one, is that when people have stopped responding but you're kind of moving toward what you want to do, we, or say, for example, parts aren't available for the recall. We're able to, you know, use that contact later feature in Volley, which is great. So we have it prompt our agents to come back a few days later or even a couple weeks later to re enter their queue to where they can say they can check for the part. For example, let's say the part wasn't available when the person reached back and say, hey, just letting you know your part's still not available, but I haven't forgotten about you, you know, and then we have it prompt again a couple weeks later, we check again and then if the part is there, we can say, hey, good news, the part's in, so we'd love to have you come in. Or if just someone was stopped talking. We can also follow up with that, you know, hey, notice that you stopped talking. Go on to see if you still want that appointment. Otherwise I'll stop bothering you. Just let me know. Right, that's been a good one. And we are working right now with a lot of the API integrations, which I know is the best way to work with Volley. So that's been a fun project and we look forward to like having even more integrations towards smoother and even, you know, better than we can do.

Awesome. And you know, we appreciate you as well. You know, I was talking with Liza about who would be a good one to feature on this week's Volley rally and she's like, oh, you gotta talk with Tony with Recall Masters because he has improved his agent morale. He has his WINS program, He's setting more appointments.

That's right.

I appreciate you taking the time. I hope anyone listening here is is is open minded into how they can help to incentivize their own agents to improve morale. Set more appointments and, and then how Vale can help give some visibility on all of that. Tony, I really, really appreciate the time here with me.

Hey, my pleasure. Thanks for all the stuff that you guys do. Right on.

Absolutely. Thank you too. And if you're watching, feel free to like comment, subscribe, let us know what other success stories and content you'd like to see here and have a fantastic day.

Yeah, I also love talking strategy on call center stuff. So if anyone's watching this and wants to talk about how they can use the WINS program or make their own version, I'm happy to chat with them. Absolutely.

We'll throw your contact info in the description here. Thanks. Have a great day.

Thanks, Jake.

And then you can kill the.