Keep Your Promises To Your Customers

Why don't you, before we officially dive in, why don't you go ahead and, and kind of kick this off by telling everyone. Kind of the impetus for this session today.

Yeah, we're trying to add a little more science to what's happening in Valley. Now. This talk is kind of art plus science. We know a lot of people signed up for volley to grow their business via outbound, but the first basic step is how do you manage the business and keep the promises to your customers who are trying to do business with you? And so wanted to take about 25 minutes and walk through some soft skills and some things that you can do in volley to, to break this down a bit and, and also just what numbers are good. So we're going to talk about inbound today. Our next webinar will be about outbound conversions. We're going to have a couple of them on outbound. We're, we're going to skip August and then, you know, just finish up summer. And then we will, we will have, we will have a couple outbound sessions and then finally we're going to talk about how to, how to use the conversational intelligence to convert more people as well. But yeah, we just, we get a lot of people ask, am I doing good? What do I do? What numbers work? So we, we wanted to make it consumable.

So one thing you said there, I did set this for 90 minutes, and I know the invite everyone has is for 90 minutes. Are we only going to take about 30 minutes of everyone's time today?

Yeah, we're, we're. This will take about 30 minutes. I, to run through 25. 30 minutes. We'll open it up for questions, but, but I didn't, I didn't think I had the attention span for 90 minutes, so.

Well, good. Let's go ahead and get started. Scott?

Okay. I'm not going to say it, but I assume we're all good. Jake.

We are.

So we're going to talk today about the, the how you convert inbound calls to service appointments, some of the basics. And like I said, we will take about 25, 30 minutes available afterwards for any questions you guys have. And we'll have a recording for this, Jake. Right. We'll, we'll send it out as well.

Yeah, it'll, it'll at least be posted on YouTube. I don't know what I, I don't know how else it'll be distributed, but It'll be on YouTube. On our YouTube. And then I know they always get posted in the newsletter. That's sent out.

We put this together based on a lot of our learnings in Valley along with some of the key customers like you guys, we've got a, we've got a few of OGs on, on hand that are very good at this, have good systems in place. So I hope you like it today. And at the end, if you have any questions, we will, we'll take care of it. So first things first, with or without volley. And by the way, I see that there's quite a few people joined who aren't volley customers and that's okay. Hopefully you can take some stuff away from this as well. But we're going to start with some soft skills for first that matter. Every single customer who buys a vehicle from your dealership needs service. It's guaranteed. They don't just don't necessarily need it from you. When you're, when you're on with the customer, just keep in mind that it might not be the good, the right day that you call them. They might be on vacation, they might have something else on their mind more pressing. But you have the history and generally you re you are. They're calling in because they want service. Same thing with outbound. But if you're not able to schedule an appointment on inbound, Kayla from our team calls it two nos and a go. But just keep in mind some of the reasons you won't be able to schedule it. Probe a little bit, ask a little bit more, ask to over. You know, if it's a no availability discussion, schedule a call back, do whatever. But just keep in mind that the people are calling for service and, and if you're unable to schedule that, then, then it just needs a little bit of pushback on, on and, and to dig a little bit deeper. I'm going to talk about the next thing three or four times during, during the webinar. But are you working with your agents? There is a lot you can do to impact what you're doing with inbound. So are you scoring every call? So most of you have something like pulse that's in volley. You have call review or car wars, some type of call monitoring. Are you, are you putting a system in place so that you can catch all the calls and find the reasons that their things might be falling through the cracks? At the very least, if you are not scoring the calls, if you're not having AI listen, make sure that every week you're listening to one or two calls per agent, maybe one that converted and one that didn't so you can give them real Feedback, you'd be surprised when we look at the numbers, the variances in agents needs. So finally come at this from a stance of help. Every single customer needs service. This, this applies for inbound and outbound. When was the last time you went out to somewhere in the public and you felt like you really got good service? That's really what the people want. So when you're on with the customers, there's a big difference between kind of maybe shoulding them through the call and I got you using strong words. There's a great YouTube with Kim Grubb from Joe Cooper where she talks about power words that she insists on. You're here to help the customer. Teach your agents to be more confident. Teach them to say, I got you. We're going to take care of you and know that your agents are doing a good job for them. So more basics in the toolbox. We can help you with any of these, by the way, but are your agents armed with objections and and rebuttals? Do you have a sheet that you pass out? Liza's team has stuff they can start you with, but these are really individual to your dealership based on availability, on your loaner policies, all those things. When things go bad, we fall to our lowest level of training. Make things easier on your agents. Do you give them canned answers when. When there are no availability slots available? Make sure those are in their toolbox and then drill on dispositions whether you have volley or not. The. The reasons why you convert and don't convert are are very important for you to track. They will allow you to make good business decisions and increase the conversions that you have. So Jacob, by the way, any questions or anything that you felt like I left out, don't hesitate to jump in as well.

Yeah, that sounds good. Can you. Before we continue, you mentioned it. Can you kind of just define what you mean by Kayla's two no's and a go?

Sure. Everyone needs help. If we're not able to help them, we need to. Instead of just saying okay or moving on. We have their history. You can tell whether they've been in before. 83% of the inbound calls, we know who's calling. Of course, we're not calling outbound unless we have their history. So when we say when Kayla says two nos and a go, what. What she's saying is if you get a no, just probe a little bit. Ask if there's a better time to call. If you get a no availability, ask if you can check and see when you can get them in. And call them back and schedule a call back. What? One thing that will help your BDC all the way around is if you drill and train on making sure you get a second no. So don't give up on the first no.

Sounds good. Yep. Thank you.

Okay. Confirming calls. So just the basics are do you guys have a system in place to confirming your appointments? If they don't show up then then you know, not only is that a lost opportunity with that customer but you also took off, took up a prime spot for someone else who might want it, who's calling in. So do you have a system in place if you don't whether you have volley or not, at the very least do these calls via via or do confirmation, SMS's or emails if you can't do calls at least but I would have a process in place. Our best dealerships work hard to confirm appointments. We see show rates in the 90s for those dealerships. Okay, the basic metrics, some of the basics of doing a good job on answering inbound calls. What is your agent drop rate, what is your customer drop rate and then what staffing levels that we need and we're going to dig into that a little bit. But do you know those numbers? How are you measuring to it and, and we can help you with that. So some of that comes in to agent performance and it'll dictate a lot of the other numbers. What is the wrap up time in Voli you can get this if you, if you're not a volley customer, look for ways to track this. Our best performing BDC in a lot of ways they benchmark to a 33 second. A 33 second wrap up time. So since they know who the customer is they're, they're and by the way they have one of the oldest schedulers in, in the books. They're working off two monitors. What is your wrap up time? Just keep in mind that if an agent is taking 70 inbound calls a day, saving 30 seconds off your wrap up time per call can can enable them to take about 10 more inbound calls per day. So just keep that in mind. What about the speed of answer? Are they answering? Are you monitoring the ignores? Their speed of answer should be in in the 1, 2, 3 second range. So if it's not agent performance can really affect your conversions. Staffing levels when we look at staffing levels we look at 70 leads or 70 inbound calls plus 150 outbound calls is about the level to know whether you're perfectly staffed. So to get a 6% drop rate. We see a good BDC. And by the way, when I say good or bad, this is just work, Right? But really, if you take 60 to 70 inbound calls, our top BDCs are making 150 outbound calls and you can have a drop rate of about 6%. You are never going to have a drop rate of 0%, an agent drop rate, just because the calls never come in evenly. But just kind of look at your numbers, see where you're at, work with your CS team, figure out about how many inbound calls. And there's lots of different kinds of inbound calls, but we'll get back to that in a second.

So can, can you define just for someone who might not know, maybe they're not a volley customer? What you how you differentiate between just your drop rate and your agent drop rate?

Sure. So we classify it two different ways. You have agent drop rate, which are the calls that agents had a chance to answer, they went on hold in the queue and the customer then hung up before they reached them. Customer drop rate are people that hung up right when they hit the IVR. Customers hate IVRs for the most part, so there's not a ton you can do about it. You should look at it. We see a percentage of 3 or 4% on a customer drop rate as being normal, but that's the difference. We want to, we want to try to get to 6%. We see a lot of dealerships in the 4% range, but generally if you kind of look at 60 to 70 inbound calls, you each agent should be able to make about 150 outbound attempts and your agent drop rate can be around 6%. And then you know you're fully staffed and can maximize the outbound business. To grow your business, call back 100% of your missed calls. So we looked at 25 million calls recently. If you call them back, 58% answer 59% schedule an appointment. These people are buyers. Some of them of course are status check people or calling for other reasons. But in Vale you can automatically call them back. You can manually in the missed call screen. If you've got a VoIP system like Total CX or GoTo, they don't dedupe the numbers and they don't tell who it is. But at least you have a mechanism to know who, who missed the call. Make sure you call them back. If you aren't doing this now, currently, you'll be blown away by the reaction you get from customers who are shocked that you get a call Back. So we have video or we have, we have recordings from that our dealers have sent us for customers who are shocked they get a call back. So make sure that's a normal part of your process. If you're a volley customer, it's, it's pretty standard but you can do this in a little clunkier manner, but you should be able to do this with your desk phones as well. Okay, so how would I do it if I was trying to really get a little scientific? First of all, we talked about your disposition list and training. You're giving your, your agents a list of dispositions. It's very, very important that you're precise here because if you are going to convert more inbound calls, we need to know why they're converting and what they're not. You know, volley will help track whether they're, whether they're. We call them denotes lead or not denotes leads revenue calls or not revenue calls. But make sure that every agent understands how to classify every call that comes in. Whether you're doing it with check marks, you need to break them down and solve the whys. Do you need a walk in policy for oil changes? Do you have too many no availability dispositions? I can tell you I just looked at a dealer last week and they had six no availabilities on a few thousand inbound calls. If you have 40 per store then you know it's something to work with the store level on. But dig into these dispositions and figure out the whys and solve them. So on the dispositions, that means train the agents on the dispositions, talk about why they did those, talk about the stores. When you see other outliers, non revenue calls, status checks and no availabilities. Does everyone on here have a walk in policy? Richard Danahy, fix ops director for Ed Morse Group he basically they've got a walk in policy that they have trained their agents to handle. And I, I know I'm kind of preaching to the choir, but if it's an oil change, tires or safety, if they can't come in in the day or the next day, they're going to go somewhere else. So what is your policy? It's going to take working with their service director with a fixed ops director in the group and then you need to train your agents on how to handle those because not all of them were created equal. And for instance, hey, can I get an oil change? I need it today. We're booked. Or you can drop in. That takes, that's a little bit harder phone call to Set the right expectations. So do you have a walk in policy? Have you trained your agents how to handle that walk in policy? If you don't, you're going to drive them somewhere else. If you don't drill it with the agents, you're going to stress out your customers and they're going to go somewhere else. All very straightforward stuff. But if you're, if this is a normal part of how you're training your agents, it will lower your inbound conversions. Okay, five minutes a day with each agent. Do you have a schedule? And we say five minutes but realistically it's going to take you 10. But are you spending time with every agent every day and looking at the, you know, the basics. So are you reviewing calls from yesterday or you know, if we have pulse or call review or, or car wars etc. Are you finding good ones and bad ones? Are you reviewing their, their results from the day before and are you setting goals for what they're, what they're doing now? So just very basics. Five minutes with every, every agent, every day will up your conversion. So it seems basic. I almost didn't put this slide in because I know our really good BDC managers are doing this. It just takes a little of intentionality. And I did run into a BDC that wasn't doing this last week so I did include it today. Okay, so here is some of the data and what is a good number? We see our best BDCs convert 90% of the revenue calls for into, into appointments. So the people who say I want an appointment, the best of them get about 90%. We have, we have one dealer group that gets about 95% of all the ones that are people are trying to do so break those results down by ages. I recently looked at a 10 agent BDC. The top rate was 92%. The bottom rate was 70%. So what is the difference between those agents? You're not really going to know if you, unless you dig into their numbers. So Scott converts at 92%. Jake converts at 70%. Well the average for this dealership was about 84% so that the, the bottom agent could convert at at least 10%. If they took 500 revenue calls a month, that's 50 extra appointments in the month. You know, we don't know. Some of those people got frustrated one elsewhere. Some of them, you know, called back for a better time that was more convenient. But dig into those, look at their calls, review the dispositions to make sure they're classifying things correctly and then listen to their Tone. This is where you dig into the calls or you look at pulse or something. Are they confident with the customer? Are they saying I got you? I mean really, when I look at dispositions, the dealer group I looked at last week, they had, they had about 6,000 inbound calls. They had 90 price discovery calls. Most of the customers are not shopping you for price. It feels like they all are. But all of them would happily come in if they knew that you were going to give them great service. So dig into that. Make your, your, your worst agents look like your best ones. This is one thing that you can do easily and the numbers are easily pull audible in volley. Just get with your CS rep. I don't know. Is pull audible a word, Jake? I don't think it is.

I'm going to go with no.

Yeah, but you guys get the point. So break this down by agent and then, and then train to 90%. By the way, some of those things are also in the dispositions. Make sure the campaigns are set up right, that people are classifying that right. What about if you're a dealer group? I see a few of you guys are on here. Break that down by store. Do you have, I'm sure this never happens but do you have stores that have closed the bank on certain days? They don't want appointments at, at you know, 4 o' clock on Friday afternoon. You know what are the differences between stores? You'd be amazed. There is the service scheduler set up correctly. Break it down by store, see if there's anything obvious. But the numbers are all there. We know the appointments that are set up that are revenue calls and the ones that are just, are just inquiry calls, status checks, etc. So break those down, the answers are there and try to get to 90%. And that's, that's a lot of the science between it. Some of the other thing is what is, what is a good number of. Of status checks? What is a good number of non revenue calls? So our best bdcs have a status check number of about 20%. The average over 200 million calls is about 24.5% our non revenue calls. You have some ability with your dealership to eliminate these non revenue calls. A lot of why you guys are taking them though is because you're helping the dealership another way. At the very least track what they are through the disposition report in volley. If you're doing it by hand, you're going to have to make check marks. But at least you can come close. Try to eliminate as many of Those non revenue calls as possible. So status checks, let's talk a little bit and we'll dig into those a little bit. The average status check including transfers is three minutes and 56 seconds. The average person will call back one and a half times. So dig into the status checks and see what obvious things you can do to eliminate those. Every, every one that you eliminate helps inbound go smoother, you know, releases the pressure there and it allows you then to move on to outbound for how you're going to grow your business. Just a tool by the way, if you're not doing this in Valley, have you guys ever had a customer. If you've got a, if you have a, if you've got your phone set up so it's press one to schedule a service, press two to check on your car. We see a lot of press ones. That's really a status check. And you know, if you have volley, I would, I would set that up with our ivr. Even if it's the same number, just, we'll catch this in the district, the dispositions, but we'll also catch it in how many people are pressing one. And then it's a status check. We can break that out for you, but it'll just, it'll take some of the human element out of the reporting. Beware of the rollover. Now some of you have a, have a strategy in place where, where if they don't answer in two minutes, they're going to roll it over to a service advisor if you're fully staffed. I would really guard against that. Remember, if it's no one's job then or if it's everyone's job then no one is responsible. 69 of all drops happen within 30 seconds anyway. So that's why we want to go back to number of inbound calls we're receiving, number of outbound attempts we want to make. And you can be successful in volley. If your agents make 90, take 90 inbound calls a day, they'll just be making less outbound attempts. When we looked at the, the millions of calls that come in, 37% of the calls that get transferred to service advisors never connect. The service advisors, by the way. They're not just ignoring you though it feels like it sometimes. Sometimes. I mean most of the time they're in front of the customer and that's where the dealer wants them. The rollover is dangerous. I recently heard a hundred million study by call review, that's the same stat. Customers call in, 37% never reach their intended target. It would be my advice if you want to convert more inbound calls is to try to avoid the rollover if you can. We have some dealers that deploy it. If you're really short of staff, you're going to have to do it. Just my goal would be to work back through that. Use the hold options in volley or in your phone system. Allow the customer the option to respond by text or to get a call back. Make it easy to take the pressure off you and, and you'll convert more and you'll make an, you'll, you'll make an impact. So when we look at Volley and we look at the drop calls, a large procession, a large percentage of these people never call back in. Now, sometimes they never call back in because they sell their car, they've moved. We're on the margins, right? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5% better of all. These numbers are huge, huge numbers to your BDC and your profitability. Just know, put all these things in place and, and you will keep your promises to your customers because really that's what they're looking for when, when they call in to you. They're hoping that the promise that when they bought the car that, that you'll take good care of them afterwards. You'll, you'll do and you'll take care of. And then they'll be repeat buyers again. I went through that pretty quickly. It was 29 minutes that we got through it, Jacob. But I hope that was helpful today. Some of the things that really will help you there are just, I mean, if I had to pick one thing, immediately set up your tool set for your customers. Not only objections, rebuttals, train on dispositions and start being a little bit intentional for what you're trying to do in inbound. You'd be shocked when you break it down by agent. You'd be shocked at how you can move the needle on inbound. And really, we want to very quickly do a good job in inbound so we can grow our business on outbound. Right? Because every single person who schedules an outbound appointment, we get to schedule when it's convenient for us. They weren't going to come in or they weren't going to come in fast enough. So that's a lot of the strategy of what we're doing.

We do have. Thanks, Scott, for running through that. We do have a couple of questions that have come in and anyone else, feel free to get them in. A lot of great information, a lot of great data that backs some of this stuff up and hope you all wrote down some good insights there. So, one question here. Is it worth calling customers back if they've only held for a couple seconds? So this I would guess is in reference to your customers dropped after hitting the ivr.

Yeah, we. We find that the answer rate on customer drops is still very good. I would call back every customer, no matter what. I mean, it doesn't take long to mow through them and. And at the very least, they'll be shocked to get a friendly voicemail to say, I'm. I'm sorry we missed you. Mm.

The quality of the voicemail also in callback also helps matters.

Yeah. You know, Jake, I should have included that in my presentation. It will be for outbound, but I, I would script the voicemails. I would drill them. The more cleanly you speak, the better your delivery. All these calls are transcribed in their voicemails as well. So friendly voicemails really help conversion.

So this was obviously related to service, but are we hosting. Do you have any plans to host similar webinars for Sales bdc?

Yeah, so I didn't include sales BDC in this because inbound calls are, are, you know, they dominate service bdc. I will be talking about inbound conversions when we get to our Pulse webinar, which will be number four. But yeah, I will do that. And then as far as outbound, we will break this out with Sales BDC and Service bdc. Now that we've got real numbers for Sales bdc, as we're adding quite a bit of stores, there's some interesting insights.

Okay. How would you easily find, slash get your inbound conversion rate less the status checks?

You can either dig these things out of exports or a report. I can get them through the heat report. But really, I think I would make it a priority with your CS rep for the next time that you talk with them. So, you know, in. In the heat report, you can, you can sort calls by revenue and non revenue quite easily. I know Cassie has put together some incredible reporting with that as well. But with our new reporting platform that comes out, it'll just be a report that's served up to you, but the data is right there. It's shocking when you break it out by agent, so.

And I know this, this person as well said I'd love for it to be easier to do that. Right. As you were talking about how we're going to be prioritizing things like that for the new reporting dashboard, we're at.

The tail end of this and it can't come soon enough.

Well, good. Those are the questions we've had so far that have come in. Any other questions? We'll hang out for a couple of minutes here and then and then we can get rocking and rolling. Any other closing thoughts that you have?

I just want to reiterate a lot of people when we do demos for Volley, they they oh yeah, I want to do it to grow my business. They almost look at Inbound like it's well, that's coming to me anyway. The numbers don't bear out that it's just coming to you anyway. Between working with your agents, making customers feel confident, having a walk in policy that makes sense that you've worked out with every store and you've trained the agents how to deliver that you can make an impact and just put some science behind it.

How can people get you if they have any questions or follow ups or want to hear anything else in the future?

Sure. I answer my phone every time. Scott Davis 319-240-2743 scottally.com or if you tell your CS rep, I'll be on the next call.

Awesome. Well, thank you all very, very much for joining. We really appreciate it and we hope you all have a fantastic day.

Thank you.