How Volie is Revolutionizing BDCs - Scott Davis on CBT News

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This is Driving Solutions exclusively on CBTNews.com hey everyone. Jim Fitzpatrick, thanks so much for joining us this morning. Your BDC plays a crucial role in the success of your service department and in turn your dealership's bottom line. So it's important that they, you know, have the right tools and training to operate efficiently. We are joined now by Scott Davis, who's the president and co founder Volley of, to walk us through what that could look like with his solution. So we're so excited to have you. Scott, thank you so much for joining us in the studio.

Yeah, very excited to be here, Jim.

Yeah.

So it's funny, during COVID everything was done through zoom and to have people back in the studio is so much better. So thanks for making the trip in. As I said in the opening, it is so vitally important to the bottom line that we don't miss opportunities through our bdc. So for the dealers that are watching right now, and we want to be bringing these solutions to dealers, that's why we had you come in. Talk to us about Valley. What's your story?

Yeah, we're BDC software. We work with 750 dealers in the US and we onboarded our first dealer in 2021.

Wow. 750 in the last three years.

Yeah. We're based out of Fort Myers, Florida. And it's BDC software that allows a dealer to have all the tools to run their BDC from data management to. To putting a strategy in place that they can follow. And we built it on top of a call center. Call center software. Cause dealer bdcs are really call centers. And up until now they had desk phones, they had printed lists and manual processes. And I've heard a thousand times, geez, I used to have a great BDC till Jim left and it all fell apart. Or gosh, you know, we have a bdc. It's really expensive.

Right, Right. Really expensive. It's looked at as an expense rather than an asset or an investment in the business. Right.

Which is a big M. Yeah, well, I mean the cost of an agent has gone up exponentially. Dealerships complexity has gotten a lot, a lot tougher. You know, that productivity has stayed the same until Vale. And you know, as you know, 2022, new car sales peaked. The trade cycle has been lengthened. Dealers sign up with us because there's a literal math cliff coming for those who don't improve their loyalty in their system. We help agents be two times more efficient. At least we give the dealers the tools so they know Their strategy has been implemented. They have live dashboards that they can see it in real time and really, I guess from there we just love it. All of our founders are still involved in the business. I've got a lot of family members so working in it as well. I can't afford for it to be that. We love to work with the dealers. We're not, not going anywhere. We're, we're going to earn it every month.

Sure.

And you've got experience in working with dealers, right, in previous companies and such, right?

Yeah, yeah.

I started in the auto business in a kind of a roundabout way. But in 2002 I worked, I did service retention and for 80 dealers in the Midwest.

Wow.

We built a equity mining marketing platform in 2008 and it was actually, we worked with Team Velocity and, and it was part of their Apollo system for a very short time.

Okay.

But.

Yeah, yeah, so you know, you know the business, you know the business and what dealers are going through and what they need done.

Right, yeah.

And it's a good point that you made that you know the costs have skyrocketed on agents and, and everything in the dealership nowadays, which puts even that much more of an emphasis on every opportunity and dealers do not want to miss an opportunity. Right. So how do dealers use it?

Yeah. So it is the software that they use 100% agents take their inbound calls in Valley. When they're not in an inbound call. We serve up the next most important outbound call that the dealer wants made. It is an omni channel platform, calls, email and sms. But I mainly talk about calls because a lot of what happens with email and SMS happens automatically.

Yeah.

So we help them manage agent efficiency and help them grow their business.

And in terms of training, do you provide training to those agents as well?

Yeah, we have dedicated account managers for them. So they set up the account, they train the BDC manager how to do it, they train all the agents and then they do weekly calls their, their performance coach to make sure that they're growing their business. We do have, we don't do a specific training on, on phone scales and such, but we do work with David Cain and his organization to, to, to supplement some of that as well.

Yeah, yeah.

Does a fantastic job. No question about it. You've got this case study situation. It's. Give us an overview of the 25 million call case study. 25 million calls. That really gives you an idea of what's really happening out there.

Yeah, we went back enough months that we could look forward 120 days to, you know, to build the results on this to. It was 11.8 million inbound calls, 13 point some million outbound calls. And we wanted to put the stance together so whether they had volley or not, they would know what they need to do to run their bdc.

So where did you get the data from? Was it just from the 750 dealers you deal with?

Okay, yeah. Wow.

So that's the kind of volume they're getting.

Yeah. I mean, a typical dealer, they're going to benchmark inbound calls. So separately from outbound calls. So a typical agent in Valley is able to take 60 or 70 inbound calls a day, make 150 to 200 outbound attempts a day. That's if they're taking inbound calls. If they're just doing outbound, they can do about 42 an hour. So it was not that hard to go back that far, and it was really interesting.

So what did you find from that?

Well, the first thing dealers need to focus on is keeping the promises to their customers. And everyone is a guaranteed service transaction. They're just not necessarily guaranteed to go to the dealership. By the way, I should back up. When we started selling direct to dealer, there was not a lot of inventory. Dealers weren't spending money on their sales BDC. So about 100 of our stores use it for sales BDC. All of them use it for service BDC. So keeping their promises to their, to their customers, first of all starts with inbound. Okay. So keep your drop rate low. Call back. 100% of the people that do drop, 58% of those people answer. And of those, 59% will schedule an appointment.

Really?

Wow.

A lot of these are status checks too. So we help them monitor that as well.

Okay.

And so those were some, some great, great learnings. That's a really hidden cost in the BDC. The status checks. The average status check over these 11.8 calls.

What's the definition of a status check?

Hi, Jim. Just calling about my Camry that's in the shop. I was supposed to hear from the service advisor. I've not heard from him. Is it ready?

Yeah. Gotcha. Gotcha.

And that's a, that's a large part.

Well, the average status check was four minutes.

Okay.

So 63% of the time they successfully connected with the service advisor. The average person called in one and a half times for a status check. We saw a lot of really, really angry customers. So, yeah, there's a lot to managing inbound, keeping the promises with your customers. They're shocked. We've got recordings of customers being shocked that they get called back and then they want to grow their business with outbound. One thing we learned, and every dealer wonders if any of the money they spent on marketing or their efforts is worth it.

Yeah.

What happens if I did nothing?

Right.

And that question comes up. Yeah, we can. We took a bunch of customers who were due for service. We compared them with the people that they connected with. The lift on the database was about 52% compared to if they did nothing, if you spoke with them, and then you looked 120 days forward.

Right.

So there, you know, there's just a lot of strategies to do that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So it definitely. So this is really where the rubber meets the road in the industry, isn't it? I mean, with all the advertising out there and all the noise and you can build the greatest facility in the world that the OEM loves you for, but this one area is really where it all happens, isn't it?

Yeah. It's the gateway for most of your customers to enter the dealership now in the digital age. And it's going to get even more prominent.

That's right. That's right. And now it's, you know, easy to. When you look up a dealer and its address. This is right there. Website or phone call. You're hitting phone call. What time you open? Do you have this. Do you have this car? What about service? Whether my. My car is in service or I'm going to call to make a service appointment.

Right.

So you. So it's just that many calls, that many more calls and that much more of an emphasis on the dealer that's handling all that, those inbound and outbound. To your point, phone calls.

Right.

There's millions of dollars can be made.

Yes, definitely.

Yeah.

And lost, right?

Yeah, hopefully not, but. Yeah, but yeah, there's. There's a lot of opportunity.

Yeah.

On average, how many. What would you say is the average percentage of the number of calls that are either dropped or not successfully connected in a dealership or maybe, you know that number.

Yeah, it's, it's. It depends. Most of our stores are central BDCs for dealer groups.

Okay.

We try to benchmark that at about 6% with 100% callback rate.

Okay.

We've seen stores start very, very rarely are they below 10%.

Okay.

We've seen stores or groups start where their drop rates. 30%.

Oh, my gosh, 30%.

A single store has a little bit tougher math. We've got a lot of A lot of great single stores that run this. They're. Some of them, it really depends on, on their staffing levels. Yeah, we'd like them to get down to six. Some of them struggle to do that. It depends on staffing.

But there's definitely in every single dealer that's out there, there is that loss percentage that you just.

No kidding.

You're saying 5 or 6% is at least acceptable.

It's just simple math. Calls are never perfectly distributed. But if you keep it as low as possible, if you're. These are big dollars. They're working. So if they can, they're working on the margins. I mean not everyone who leaves you, it's because you made them mad. Sometimes they move or they sold the car. Yeah, sure. But if we can improve 1% here and 2% here. If we can get an ext 10 outbound appointments per agent. Those are big dollars.

Oh, huge.

Even though I think a lot of dealers use us, they want to grow their business, they want to be more efficient, they want to save labor.

Right.

We've had dealers before volley have 32 agents. They go down to 17 agents and their call volume went up by six times outbound. A lot of dealers just want to know what's happening in their bdc. They wanna see that they're executing the strategy that they have. We also help eliminate a lot of the manual labor for the managers so.

They can do a lot more coaching, which is fantastic. I mean as a former manager myself, if you can take that workload off, then I'm gonna be way better off. Talk to us about the results that a dealer can see. I mean you just mentioned a few of them, but what else comes to mind?

Yeah, I mean certainly managing their drop rate to be lower. Every 1% that they're going to lower their drop rate is 50 extra service appointments to drive that out. Over 10,000 calls.

Wow, that's a lot of service appointments.

The main, one of the main benefits they're going to do is either increase the velocity on their database with outbound with calls and emails also. Okay. If you take, you know like a service retention campaign with a four attempt service retention campaign, you're going to get about a 35% answer rate if you've got ways to manage potential spam, etc. And so 100 attempts is about 35 conversations. Good agents will convert nine of those through appointments. Seven if you're an average agent. And so a lot of it comes down to math. And when you schedule an outbound appointment, they're either Weren't going to come in.

Right.

Just because, I mean, they don't think about us as much as we think about. No, that's true. And they maybe, maybe drove past Jiffy Lube. Yeah. Or we got them to come in faster and improve the velocity on the database. One of the interesting things from this call study is 28% of the customers who the agents marked as not interested came in within 120 days. So really, you know, wow. Agents. And with or without volley, you need to rejoice that you're helping customers. And this is a not right now.

Yeah.

Because they still need service. So we've got to leave friendly voicemails. We got to help them because most customers, they just, they just don't want to be aggravated. And so put a strategy in place where you're going to be helpful to your database and they'll come in anyway. Think of that 28%. And they just weren't ready that day.

Right.

That's all that meant.

Yeah, yeah.

You didn't call them and if they were a little short with you, they didn't wake up trying to ruin your day.

That's right. Don't take it personally.

A lot of good learnings there.

Yeah, yeah.

No question about it. So what does the out or that should the onboarding process look like for dealers that are interested?

So when we start, say we get an agreement in today, we'll schedule a getting started call tomorrow where we quickly. Yeah. Our goal is to get a dealer up and going in about two weeks.

Okay.

If, if it's a dealer group, then it usually takes about three weeks.

Okay.

But we start on day one. We get the data, you know, we get the DMS data automatically coming in.

Right.

We build out their campaigns.

Okay.

We, we have a product called Dealer Identity where we make sure that none of their calls get labeled as potential spam.

Okay.

And that takes, we verify their entity with the carriers, we submit the numbers. That takes about two weeks to get in. So. And then we do calls with them every other day. We get headsets ordered and, and then we train the customers and we launch.

Is there on site training as well as, as remote training or how does that work?

We leave it up to the dealer. We will come on site. We don't charge extra. We do have a setup fee.

Okay.

A lot of that comes to getting their data and such. I would say most larger groups have us come on site.

Yeah.

We just charge actual travel expenses.

Okay.

Yeah. It makes sense though, to have that actual trainer there and meeting with the people. I think that that works wonders.

Right.

Well, one of the complaints that you get from a lot of people before Volley is, geez, we had a central bdc. The service managers hated it because they never felt like they were getting the attention that they needed. With Volley, you build a plan for every store. You set priorities. Our campaign engine can make sure that each store gets the exact amount of love every day based on the size of their stores. So now BDC managers can be much more collaborative with the stores and show them, hey, this is exactly what happened. What changes should we make?

Cool.

Yeah, it's. That's the hardest part for a central BDC is working out the math of how they please all of their internal customers.

Right, Right.

So coming in person is.

Yeah. Especially if a BDC is in charge of, you know, five or 10 stores, I mean, they can get a little overwhelming.

Right.

Yeah.

So they're just processing calls and not really focusing on that. The needs of the individual dealership.

Yeah.

Because some stores, they want their, their full. Their ways out. They want to make sure they've scheduled the right of appointments. Right, Right. High revenue ones. Other ones just need transactions that'll determine, you know, what they're going to enroll their customers in for. Campaigns.

Right, Right.

Have you had many customers drop off the program after joining up?

Our year over year retention is almost 95%.

Wow.

So pretty impressive.

Well, we can do better. I want to get it a couple.

What, that extra 5%?

No, I just, I. We have a big responsibility to help these stores. I feel bad if anyone feels like we haven't.

Sure.

So we're going to keep working at it.

That's great. That's great. And who is, who is your typical customer?

Yeah, most of our Customers are central BDCs. They have multiple stores. We solve a lot of problems for central BDC. You know, we've got customers who, they had 20 stores, many different phone systems, et cetera, and we bring it all into one place. That makes it a lot easier. So central BDCs that want to save money, you know, if you have eight stores that you run separately, you. You need quite a bit of coverage at every store.

Right.

If you have eight stores that you have one manager who can manage them all, you might need nine people for those eight stores with the bdc, where at a store level, you might need three or four people at every store.

Yeah.

So that's true.

That's our typical customer. A couple hundred single stores.

Okay.

As well. And you know, are you doing many.

Installations of BDCs from the ground up. Have you ever get a dealer that says, I don't have a bdc but I want to go to one. Can you help them with that as well or.

We didn't at the start. Yeah. And. And as we started selling, a lot of it was word of mouth. Nowadays that's much more common. There is a, there is a big push to bring BDCs in house.

Yeah.

And they don't know where to start, so.

Right, right.

You know, we're, we're luckily getting a decent amount of name recognition and sure can keep at it.

Yeah.

No, no question about it. That's how we heard about you, from the kind of the buzz that you've created out there among the dealer community. And whenever something's working for one dealer, as you know, they go to the deal or they go to nada meetings or what have you and say, hey, I got a solution for you.

Right.

I mean, that's how it grows. So what's next for the company?

Really? We don't have any big end goals in sight. We just want to keep doing better. We've got a few products rolling out that will help the dealer. Our goal is to take that two times and double it again. So we've got some ways that AI will help the customer. You know, we're going to be rolling those out in the next year. Little things from, you know, how much value is left in the queue to scoring some calls to give feedback.

Okay.

So, you know, we're going to bring out more things to help the dealer. We've got quite a few things with sales bdc. We already have event solutions and E Leads integration. We've got a few projects there that we're working on. Really. We're just going to put our heads down and keep working those to the.

Grindstone and I'll help dealers out.

We love it.

Figure it out.

That's.

That's pretty cool. Pretty cool. Scott. Dave is president and co founder of Valley. So for dealers that are watching, you've heard me say this before, these are the kinds of solutions that we want to be bringing you at CBT News. This is a great company. It's a great place to start. In the event that you're looking for a BDC company, give Scott a call. I'm sure that you'll take calls from dealers.

Absolutely.

To say, hey, hey, Scott, here's where we're at. Can you help us? Can you not help us? You know, and, and what's next?

Right. Yeah, yeah.

I'm. My background, I Used to be in the pizza business as well. Right out of college. I answer the phones at nights. On the weekends, I'm working all the time. So. So you will be here.

You will bring them more leads or their pizza is free.

Yeah, maybe passed on that, but it's right here. When, when they need.

That's great. Well, thank you so much, Scott, for stopping in.

Really appreciate it. This is fun and great opportunity. I'm excited.

Great.

I got this chance.

Yeah.

Thanks for coming in. Thanks for watching Driving Solutions exclusively on CBTNews.com.

We've got a few projects there that we're working on. Really? We're just going to put our heads down and keep working.

Those are the grindstone. And I'll help dealers out.

We love it.

Figure it out.

That's.

That's pretty cool. Pretty cool. Scott Davis, president and co founder of Voli. So for dealers that are watching, you've heard me say this before, these are the kinds of solutions that we want to be bringing you at CBT News. This is a great company. It's a great place to start. In the event that you're looking for a BDC company, give Scott a call. I'm sure that you'll take calls from dealers.

Absolutely.

To say, hey, Scott, here's where we're at. Can you help us? Can you not help us? You know, and, and what's next?

Right. Yeah. Yeah.

I'm my background. I used to be in the pizza business as well. Right out of college. I answer the phones at nights. On weekends, I'm working all the time. So.

So you will, you will bring them more leads or their pizza is free.

Yeah, maybe passed on that. But I'm here when, when they need.

That's great. Well, thank you so much, Scott for stopping in.

Really appreciate it. This is fun and great opportunity. I'm excited.

Great.

I got this chance.

Yeah.

Thanks for coming in. Thanks for watching Driving Solutions exclusively on CBTNews.com.