Scott Davis - Updated Call Study on Fixed Ops Roundtable

Welcome back to the Fixed Ops Roundtable. Scott Davis, the president of Volley is with us today. Volley is Automotive's number one BDC software. Scott is a great friend to the industry and has been blowing it up here on the roundtable. The last several events. A big study to be announced today. Scott, welcome back to the Fixed Ops Roundtable.

Hey Ted, great to be back. Thanks for having me.

I really enjoyed when you delivered the study. I believe it was the middle of last year and you survey, you have millions of calls in this study and it's eye opening and it got a lot of attention, Scott, so I'm so happy you're here today to update it. Take us through it. And with that I'm going to go ahead and turn the show over to you.

We all know what's been going on with interest rates. Everything in the automotive market, the way to build predictable profits is through your service bdc. I'm going to talk about that today. So we are. Well, okay, Ted, I don't know what I did, but you're going to cut that out, right?

Yeah, we are. Yeah. You should be able to advance the slides without that.

There we go. All right, so I'm going to talk to you today about your service BDC and how you can put a little strategy. You know, these are the predictable profits in your dealership. And we're going to talk about this. So Vale is Automotive's number one BDC software. Like Ted said, we work with dealers across North America, 620 right now. And it's a tool that, that it's an all in one solution where dealers, BDCs, they take inbound calls in Valley when they're not on an inbound call. Then we serve up the next most important outbound call. And you know, it's a way to make your, your agents turn one agent into five. We help them be really productive. It's a multi channel unit platform. Call, email and sms. A lot of the email and SMS that's happening happens behind the scenes for the agents. So we focus on calls. We talk about being 85% efficient with the calls. And so I have a call study today with about that we, that we looked at 25 million calls. So Valley Space, Fort Myers, Florida. Yeah. And just great to be here today.

I like that by the way, turn one agent into, into five agents. That's so strong.

Yeah. Well, dealerships, everything's been getting more complex in a dealership. They're, they have less resources. Well, they've got to do more and more BDC technology Really hasn't changed. They have to do more. I was actually just speaking with one of our customers out of Miami last night, and he was talking about how the heck does he ever get it done, the general manager for a large group. So BDC is no different. We all feel it, really. But people are keeping their cars longer than any time since 2008, 2009. We know the reasons why, right? Inflation, high interest rates, a tough economy. Those are just a few. And so that means with, with new car sales bottoming out in 2022, loyalty has never been more important. Right, because you know, you get more built in service business with new car sales because of warranties, OEM incentives, etc. Right, Ted?

Oh, no question about it, Scott. No, no doubt about it. And you hit the nail on the head with all the reasons, you know, where we are in this current economy.

Yeah, the, the problem with that is that your service department is, is the source of a lot of sales. So that's why we put this together. Whether you use volley or not, you know, hopefully you can get some good information out of this. Really the keys to doing this. First of all, if it were my bdc, understand the science behind, you know, how you can be successful, the big numbers you need to know, and then put a strategy together so you can reach out to people proactively. I'm going to show you guys why that's important. Your customers don't think of you as much as you think of them, and then put a system in place, train your people, leave, you know, train them on everything from scripts for service retention to voicemails, etc. And so you'll let your customers know that, that they're valuable to you and not just transactions. So that's kind of the strategy at a high level. And we'll dig into the, some of the stats.

Scott I've always said that the fortune is in the follow up. And this really helps the dealership, at the dealership level do this. Just that.

Okay, so like I said, we did base this on 25 million phone calls last year. We did it on 10. We've had a good year and had some interesting learnings with throwing a lot more data behind this. So I think you guys will like it. So first of all, inbound. Now, one thing I want to, I want to just remind everyone about service. Service is a guaranteed transaction. Every single person who buys a car needs service. They just don't necessarily need it from you guys. So how do you make sure that you keep your promises to the people who are trying to do business with you. How do you make sure that you, you have hit the people when they're due for service before they think of someone else on the day? Right, because everyone needs service. They just don't necessarily need to get it from us. So first of all, inbound, we talked about this last year. I just wanted to highlight once again, most of your calls are coming between 2 and 5. This graph is a little bit off because the volume between 8 and 9 is about half of what it is from 9 to 1. So it makes the numbers look a little different. Your staffing strategy needs to be locked and loaded and ready at 9. Just keep in mind, if your BDC agents or anyone says all my customers don't call at this time or we're not busy at this time, it's pretty normal, pretty static from, from night, from 9 to 5, business hour over, over all of these inbound calls. And of the 25 million, it was 11 million inbound calls was 10 to 11 this year. So though they were all very close within a couple points, 9 to 10, 10 to 11, 11 to 12, etc. Once again, we looked at this. Mondays are different. So your staffing strategy starts and it ends with Monday. All your part timers, if you have them, start them on Mondays, no days off on Mondays, etc. I broke it out a little bit different than last year. But 25% more inbound calls came on Monday than Tuesday. 41% came on more on Monday than Friday. So just keep that in mind. Those are big numbers for you folks who don't have a Saturday BDC. The people who had a Saturday BDC, 8% of their call volume came in on Saturday. And most of our customers are only open a half day on that. Right. So just know that if you don't have a Saturday BDC and you're forwarding calls to the cashier or whatever, you're probably missing some opportunities, I would say.

Look at that. And you know, that kind of explains why Monday feels the way it does at the dealership in it's still dominating. Yep.

So how do you look at drop rate? 59% of people who drop call back in. That seems pretty good. Right? Last year I had this stat and it was only 37%. And with that 37%, we took a very tight window. And so this year I wanted to look at this a little bit different. The 59% was basically forever. So you do drop some people, you don't lose all of them forever. Last year stat was very Alarming to people. And once again, the average hold time or the average drop by whole time. 69% of the people dropped in less than 30 seconds. Just think of that. And of the people who dropped, 58%, never service at the dealership again. And we went back, we went back quite a ways to get the stat and so that we could look forward. Very important to stay on top of your drop rate. Average hold time for answers calls, 46 seconds. Average hold time for agent drops, 72 seconds. People who do wait, wait for a long time in general. But just, just know that first and foremost, our goal is to make the people happy who are trying to do business with us.

Interesting. Very good.

Here's one of the alarming stats that we looked at because, you know, we, we have new customers start, and they're like, geez, I think our inbound, inbound call volume's gone down. And we dig into it with them and, and their volume hasn't gone down. Just the number of people who drop call back in a lot less. One third of the people who call back in from drop calls call back many times more than three times. So just think of how many extra resources your BDC is using if you're doing a bad job answering the phones feels like the phone's ringing all day. Right.

So that's, that's very inefficient. Yeah. Wow.

Yeah. And. And think of how frustrated people are are with that as well. So.

Yeah.

So if you call them back, good news. And 58 of them will answer. 59% of those who answer, schedule an appointment. Those are conversion rates off the charts. These people are buyers. 63% had a previous service in their DMS. One of the most alarming stats is 41% of all the drops are not your fault. So we classify them in two different ways. We have customer drops and we have agent drops. The customer drops are the people that hang up as soon as it hits the IVR. And we all know customers hate IVRs, right? I mean, there's a lot of products that are, are coming out nowadays that try to combat that customers hate IVRs. Well, 41% weren't your fault. What does that tell you? You guys need to have a strategy in place where people get called back who have dropped calls every time it's costing you tons of business.

Wow. Wow.

Okay, so this is something we looked at. We started seeing a lot of our customers tracking status checks by Service Advisor. And so we started to dig into this, and these stats are alarming. 24.56% of the calls were status checks involved. So of that 63% were answered. And when we say answered, that means the agent successfully connected with a service advisor. 37%, they never did. It's funny, by the way, I was at a show recently, a few weeks ago, and one of the other vendors that were there that does some call monitoring talked about how customers connect with the service department, and only 63% of the customers got connected to the service department. So it was the exact same number. They don't connect to the bdc. They don't connect with their customers. So the alarming status. 34% of those unsuccessful transfers didn't service. Again.

That is eye opening.

Yeah. Now, I mean, there's many reasons why people don't. Don't transact again with you. You know, some of them could have moved or, or traded their car or gotten a wreck, you know, God forbid. But, you know, we're, we're working on the margins at $285, an RO or whatever you're working on. You need to know these numbers and if you can improve them even slightly, it really moves the needle. Right.

Knowledge is power.

So we had hundreds of thousands of status checks in here. Obviously the average duration of a Status check was 3 minutes and 59 seconds.

Wow. 4 minutes.

So think of that. 24.56% calls were status checks. 3 minutes and 59 cents. 3 minutes and 59 seconds. Or status checks. And the people who called in for a status check called in more than once. One and a half time average customer. So think of the aggravation you're calling or you're, you're causing your customers who have to call in for status checks. Put a system in place where your service advisors, you know, eliminate that call on the front end. It's costing your. It's a big hidden cost to your bdc. It is a, a source of great aggravation for your customers. It was shocking to us, really. We hadn't benchmarked it before. We will this next year. I've got some good guesses. I. Actually what happened is we had a customer, a new customer. And after the first 90 days, we looked in. 37% of their calls were status checks. And we started to dig into this. A lot more is very alarming.

Oh, geez. A lot of time spent there. A whole lot. And I, I know you were transferring, translating that into money, but it needs to be said.

Yeah, yeah. And you know, how do we even quantify how aggravated people are constantly checking because they feel they're checking because they feel like a person.