Scott Davis from Volie on the Fixed Ops Roundtable

Welcome back to the Fixed Ops Roundtable. And at our event, I have never seen as much focus on the telephones. And to further this discussion, we have brought in the expert. It is Scott Davis, who is the founder and he's also the president at Volley and Volley is known throughout their industry as the number one BDC engine. Scott, welcome back to the Fixed Ops Roundtable.

Yeah, thanks, Ted. Excited to be here.

Excited to have you. Extremely timely here. We are going into the, the last quarter pretty soon. Right. Of. It's hard to believe. Right.

The year's three quarters over. It just feels like it started.

Yeah. And you know, you've, you've really taken the industry by storm, Scott, and I'm so glad that today you're going to help our audience. We're going to talk about 10 key metrics to measure in your service BDC. And you know, it's interesting because I think a lot of folks don't know what metrics or what the right metrics are that they should be looking at.

Sure. Yeah. I mean, and, and there's a million, million of them you can measure, but there's some key ones that will help you grow your business. And, and, and let's talk about it today.

Well, I'm probably most interested in this very first one, the outbound attempts per agent, because it's so key that we are proactively going out to the customer base. So talk to us about, number one, outbound.

If you're going to grow customer payro business, you need to interrupt the customer. And a good way to do it is outbound calls. Typically, if a BDC is fully staffed and they're using technology like Volley call center technology, and an agent is going to take about 70 inbound calls and they're going to make 140 plus outbound attempts, which, you know, those outbound attempts are how you're going to grow that, grow that business. You need to monitor that because the math is pretty simple. It's like a lot of things in life, the more effort you put in, the more you'll get out of it. So if you make 140 outbound attempts, you're going to speak with about 30% of them during the day. You need to quickly get through those attempts. Those 140 outbound attempts should be about 16 appointments per day. So at $295 an RO, that's good revenue each agent was able to do. Typically in a BDC nowadays using their desk phone, it's hard to get downbound calls. And if you really want to grow your customer pay service ro business, you better measure this and, and manage to it.

And I've heard that Volley's technology is like nothing else when it comes to those outbound calls.

Excuse me. Well, when an agent is not on an inbound call, we automatically serve up the most important outbound call the dealer wants to be made. So we've eliminated all the time in between a phone call, which helps them be productive. Technology has not changed in the BDC in 40 years. People are still using old technology to call their customers. All the while, their most expensive part, their agent has gotten more and more expensive. So, you know, we're a tool to help them more efficient, be more efficient.

Let's talk about number two, the drop rate.

Sure. Dealers don't want to ever drop any customer. It's not really realistic, though. We consider a dealership that has a fully staffed BDC is going to drop about 6 to 9% of their calls. Calls are never distributed evenly. If you have 10 agents and you get 20 phone calls because everyone's off at lunch, you're going to drop calls. So a good, a good BDC we're seeing is running at about 6 to 9%. And that's a level that you should be able to make 200 and some inbound, outbound combos together each day. And, and that's a level that seems to manage the business that they're, that the customers are trying to give you. So if you're higher than that, you're probably aggravating your customers and you're leaving a lot of business that you could be getting if you were managing that.

Great metrics. All right, number three, Scott, the callback rate.

Yeah. So in call center technology, that's inbound, outbound, blended, there are really two components. Certainly the amount of business you're doing by outbound and then your drop rate on inbound. So before you can get to that outbound business, you need to manage the business the customers are trying to give you. As mentioned above, a good platform will allow you to call back all the people that you missed in it. So you can essentially lower your drop rate to zero. There's been studies that have shown the 70% of the people who, who you miss, they go somewhere else. So your callback percentage should be near to 100 as possible. Good technology will allow you to manage that and, and certainly prioritize the ones. So you can do it in the order, but you, you can, you know, the first step is to do no harm for the people who are trying to Trade with you. And, and I would manage that. And I would shoot for 100 of the people call back that you missed.

I'm interested in number four, contact rate. And Scott, if you don't mind, define for us the contact rate, what that means.

Yeah, so the way we define it is the number of people you enroll in a campaign. For instance, recall or service, etc. To the people that answer the call. So if you enroll 100 people and 27 people answer the phone when you call, that's a contact rate of 27%. These contact rates will vary based on the type of campaign you're running, how current the customers are, or if they're lost customers, it'll be a lower contact rate and the number of attempts you're running. So typically with call center software, you make the first attempt. If they don't answer, you'll re enroll them in a few days or a few hours and try them again. And those are lower contact rates. But in general you need to manage it by the campaign. If, if the rate is not around 30%, it, it, it's probably something you have a problem with the government. Well, I mean, Ted, have you ever received on your phone potential spam label?

Just before we started, yeah.

Yeah. So we've integrated in technology that we've got an agreement with the carriers. Okay, white list those numbers. If you're, if you're finding a low contact rate, you know, it's quite possible you've got some negative labeling on your calls. Your data could be bad or your or your calls are being labeled, or maybe you're enrolling people who haven't been in for four years. A lot of them have moved, a lot of them aren't interested in doing business with you. You should manage this by the campaign. And if they're not the levels that you're accustomed to or that are industry standards, you know, you should figure out how to solve it because all those attempts cost money.

And Scott, I would imagine that it is the better dealers who do business with you at Volley, you know, who seek to do these things out because you're talking about things that, you know, the below average dealers, you know, just don't even do.

Oh, you know, I think most dealers are, are, are trying hard and running good businesses. I wouldn't categorize it that way. Right. I mean, we compete with 40 year old desk phone technology or some of it's new with, with VoIP technology. Maybe I just need to be a better job of evangelizing what we do. So we've got great dealers that work with us.

Okay. All right, number five, the outbound appointment conversion rate.

So once again, this, this kind of waterfalls all the way down to the number of people that you've enrolled in the campaign. Typically, you should be able to convert 11 to 15% of the people on a, on a service retention campaign that you, that you set up. If you're below that, all you know, most call center software is the calls are recorded. You should QA those calls, make sure that the agents are adhering to the scripts. You know, script adherence is very important. I know that a lot of good call centers train on the scripts for five minutes a day per agent. If you're not seeing these conversion rates, listen to a few calls, look at the people you're enrolling, make sure they fit the parameters for the campaign you're supposed to do, and track it over at $295 in Ro, which one customer gets a couple percent higher, conversion rate is, is tens of thousands of dollars in a year.

So the, the math is huge, Scott. Number six, the inbound appointment conversion rate.

Yeah. So this one is totally variable to the store by what they do service. BDCs range from ones who act as a receptionist for the store. Some of them route the status checks to the store or to the bdc, others to the service advisor. So just some basic, simple math. 70% of the people who are calling a BDC are trying to schedule an appointment. The others are our checks, status checks, et cetera. You should try to be converting over 80% of those people because they're calling to do business with you. If you're not, you need to look at that. Now, that rate might be quite a bit lower if the BDC is answering all of the phone for the entire dealership and routing people to sales and such. But I would look at that every time, every week I'd look at that number and make sure you're converting people.

I think number seven will pique the interest of most dealers and GMs. The agent. Productive time, Scott.

Yeah, I mean, we're not expecting people to be on the phone 60 minutes a day, eight hours a day. But typically, if you're using a desk phone and your typical dealerships, agents are on the phone about 35% of the time. Good dialing software will eliminate the time in between a call, make it easy for them to go from record to record. And a good benchmark would be my agents are going to be on, on talking with customers at least 75% of the time. That means that gives them enough time for their breaks. Maybe they need to log out and go speak with the service advisor or, or, or they've got other duties in the dealership. But our dealers shoot for at least 75% efficiency. We have some dealerships that, that most of their agents around 90%. Think of the difference between if you've eliminated the time in between a phone call and you get them on or you keep your agents on the phone longer, that water falls down again to that conversion rate of 11 to 15%. You need to watch the productive time of your agents and a good system will track that for them.

Everybody. We're talking today to Scott Davis. He is the co founder and president of a company called Volley. They are the number one BDC engine in the industry. And we're going over some important metrics that a lot of dealers ask about, a lot of managers may not know about. Number eight is a very high interest. Scott, the appointment show rate. Because as human beings I know, you know, I tend to forget if I have an appointment I need to have a, some kind of a system to make sure I'm reminded. What about appointments for, for dealerships?

Yeah. You know anecdotally it seems a little lower as we're winding as summer wound down. Now that we're in the fall, it's ticking up again. If you're not getting at least 80% show rate on the, on the service points you make, look at your processes. My goodness. Are you, are you reminding the customers do you have systems in place to do appointment confirmation reminders? Are you sending them notices that they scheduled one and, and those things can all be managed. That is a very simple thing to do in any system. If you're, if you're seeing lower show rates, you've spent a lot of time and energy for no payoff. It's very expensive and, and you've booked out shop time for people who are on now aren't. You're not going to be able to do billable hours for. You have to manage this. You have to have a system in place to remind these customers to come in. Especially now because you know some dealerships are short of service tax. Depending on the service are provided providing they might be two or three weeks out when they schedule the appointment. Have a system in place that, that measures and manages your appointment show rate. Make sure you put the steps in that you can make this as high as possible.

Scott, number nine I didn't even know was a metric agent ignores. Talk to us and take us through that.

Customers are always nervous when they've got a, when they're making an inbound call to a dealership, they want to be helped. You know, they're maybe confused on what they need or they don't know what to ask for. Time spent on hold adds to anxiety there. In a typical call center application, an agent, when they're served an inbound call, if they ignore it, that customer stands on hold for another nine to 12 seconds and volley. It's nine seconds. That's more time that the customer's aggravated. Those are more calls that they're pushing off on other agents, adding to their stress for the day. So I would look at that ignore rate. You'll have a good idea of what your agents are doing if they're good team members, if they're causing extra hold time for your customers. Every single agent is going to have, you know, if you see one or two ignores in a day, you know, maybe they forgot to put themselves in pause and the system automatically put them in pause and gave it ignore. Maybe, maybe their boss came up and they, you know, they weren't looking. If you have someone who has 20, 30, 40 ignores, they're probably integrating your customers and they're probably working the rest of the agents quite hard. I'd look at that number for sure.

Wow, these metrics are important. Scott, number 10. And this is a topic that's come up with a number of folks here at the round table. No availability tracking. Take us through that.

Yeah, this one is very timely. With what's going on with servers, tax shortages. You should look at how many times your agents are, are marking a call as no availability for the customer to schedule it. I just looked at one store in preparation for this. Ted, they, they took, this was a dealer group. They took 6,300 inbound calls that week and they had 35 no availability dispositions. You are always going to have some. The customer calls in, they can only come Tuesday at 11:45 and it's booked and they can't do it. So that's a normal number. I mean, 35 out of 6,300, that's normal. But if you're looking at that number and, and you see that maybe, maybe you have 300 no available, no available, no availability call outcomes. Excuse me, You've got issues. Either you have, you have a tech shortage, which you may know about, maybe you can look at extending your hours or changing those hours. One thing we see is the BDCs get a lot of pushback from the service advisors and techs to Maybe they want to block off times. Maybe they don't want to want to do schedule of service appointments at you know, 4:30 on a Thursday or Friday. And they're, and they're artificially shortening that window. You need to look at that time and you need to look at it every week because it can change on a dime and it can cost you a ton of money. I wouldn't run a business without knowing what that number is. Especially now where, where there's shortages.

Everyone, if you look at the, the metrics that Scott has shared with us and if you put a dollar amount which he has to that average ro that pencils really quickly, look at these opportunities that add up. Scott, I know our audience is going to want to reach out to you to get more information, just maybe recap these metrics. And also you know, you've built this amazing software, this platform called Volley, which I think would be a complement to most every dealership watching today. How can our audience reach out to you and how do we out more?

Well certainly you can call me or go to volley.com and schedule a demo. If you want what I presented today, just email me@scottvolley.com or you can fill out the form on the website and we'll send it to you. You know I really appreciate being on this Ted. We love Volley. We love working with the dealers and, and, and helping it make it easy for them to communicate with their customers. And you know, I hope to hear from folks I'll help you in any way I can whether or not Valley.

So and everybody you're hearing from the president and co founder of Volley, it's Scott Davis. And Scott, we've got I think on, on the roundtable the early adopter dealers and the better, you know, the dealers who want to go out and look at this proactively. So I see a great marriage here. So everybody, Scott Davis from Volley here today at the Fixed Ops roundtable. Thank you Scott.

Thanks Ted. Thanks for having me.