The Day Our BDC Became a Profit Center- Cavendar Auto Group

Hello, everyone. Welcome back to another volley rally today. And actually I, I haven't recorded one in a while. You've been seeing some other members of the team on these calls, so it's, it's nice to be back on. And I'm joined by Rob Grant. He is the BDC director at Cavinder Auto Group. Rob, how's it going today?

It's going great, Jake. Thanks for having me on.

Oh, thank you so much for taking the time. Really appreciate you. And, and Rob told me explicitly, folks, that I need to say that he is the fixed operations BDC manager. So not the. He said that was too long of a title, but I don't think it's too long.

We just do the service side.

Yes, sir. So, okay, you've been on Volley, now you have eight stores. You guys have been on for a bit. Tell us a little bit about your processes before you had Volley.

So our processes were pretty manual. So we, you know, we would get reporting through my Karma and xtime. We were using both between all eight stores and we, we were on call review total cx and so we would kind of try and mesh all that reporting together to get our numbers. We still do a little bit of that, but Vale gives us much better reporting than what we were doing before. And it's a lot easier, a lot easier to get our numbers. And you and I were just talking about beforehand. It's a lot easier to track down issues too. It's been great from that standpoint.

Yeah, it's interesting going from no visibility to having visibility on some of these things, some of the things that you uncover. It's great to help you sharpen your business. What prompted you, you guys started in over the summer, June, July, what. What prompted you guys to want to, to look at Volley?

Well, we knew that there were efficiencies that we were not hitting, so we, you know, I've been here since October of last year, so I just passed a year in my position. But we knew that we could get more outbounds in than we were getting. But we were just struggling. You know, there was that friction and, and managing the list was very, you know, manual. It was spreadsheets. And spreadsheets are hard. You know, the team, you're doing a shared spreadsheet, you're requiring people that don't really use spreadsheets well or don't know spreadsheets well to update things correctly. And, you know, at best, maybe we were hitting one outbound and one inbound at times. I mean, if we were lucky it was 1.2 or something. But we knew that we could get a lot more outbounds in if we just had more efficient system. So then, fortunately, we had a new VP of Fixed operations came in that had a lot of experience using Volley and his first visit to the bdc, when he came in, he said, you guys aren't on Bali. We've got to get you on Bali right away. That was, that was the impetus. And man, I'm telling you what a huge difference it's made.

Yeah. And to, to speak a little bit about him, he, you know, the group he was with was really strong too. You know, I think it, you know, but you guys are really, really strong. You know, we, we, Liza and I spoke with you last week and we reviewed some of the numbers and I told you this before we hopped on, but I, I pulled up, I anonymized, but I pulled up some of your numbers to compare to, you know, to show another customer today how, look how you should be doing, look how you should be pacing your agents. So, you know, it is, it is a testament to how good you're doing. So you guys signed up. I did look before at the start of June, and then you launched in July, so just over a month later for your seven stores. How, how was that launch experience?

Well, I can tell you I was nervous about the launch. I was really nervous about it. And, you know, we met with Kayla and she explained how it was going to work and how, you know, she was going to be on a live meeting and everybody could just jump in and jump off and, and, you know, that's how it would go. And, you know, we kind of mentally prepared the agents beforehand. Once, once we inked the deal, I started preparing them for the fact that they were going to be, you know, starting to hit 150 calls a day, 200 calls a day. And these were going to be expectations. And there was a lot of groaning. There was a lot of people that didn't believe it. I don't know if I fully believed it myself, but, you know, everything that I had heard from, not just from you guys, but from other, you know, clients that you have on the platform, this was very doable and, and really quite easy with the system. So that launch, though, went much smoother than I thought it would. It. It really, by the end of day two, I would say everybody was getting pretty comfortable with the, with the system. Kayla stayed on with us, I think, through day three, and I think, I think day four. She checked in in the morning but we were, we were good, we were rocking and we would pull her in when, you know, we had questions or there was an issue or something needed to be adjusted or something like that. But it really went a whole lot better than I expected it to.

And you know, tell me a little bit about. Because you guys onboarded another store then in September. So what, you know, how did that go, bringing on another store once you are, once you were already rolling?

Yeah, that. It was almost like we didn't even notice, I mean, to be honest with you. So, so we did. We, we had one store in the group that had maintained their own internal bdc. And then a decision was made to go ahead and roll it into ours. And I think largely because everything was going so smoothly and, and so that, that's our flagship store. It's, it's our, you know, it's, it's our first store. And so they had a very good process down there. But when we, when we rolled it in, I mean, the uptick in volume, I don't think really nobody felt it just, it just rolled in so easily and it's been going great and, and now, you know, we're hitting numbers on their outbound they could only dream of, you know, so it's helping drive some traffic there.

Yeah, we were, you and I were looking at some of this before we hopped on. And you have some agents who are hitting some really large amounts of call volume and you also have some agents who are converting, you know, really, really strong. You had an agent yesterday, so we're recording this on a Tuesday, so yesterday, on a Monday, who scheduled 72 appointments. You know, I, I guess just, you know, could you speak to that? And how, you know, how does volley help that agent? I mean, and you have a high performing team in general, but you know, you have one agent who's really killing it. So you know, how is Valley helping you? You get that done.

So I'll give a shout out. That agent is Diana. And Diana is just one of those people that she naturally just talks to people as though she's known them forever. And those conversations for her are very easy. Where volley's made the difference is she can have a heck of a lot more of those conversations day. So, you know, Diana doesn't, I mean, when she's at her desk, it's just work. It's just, she's just cranking through calls. But everyone is a personal phone call. She gets the customer personal attention and she doesn't let anything stand in her way. I mean, she, if the customer puts up an objection to something, she figures out a way to answer that objection and get them to book an appointment. So it. It. It's amazing. The 72 is amazing. But I. I don't find it surprising for Diana, you know, now that she's got a tool that helps her be efficient. I mean, I. I think we'll probably see even bigger numbers out of her, believe it or not. But I will say yesterday was a very busy day. We had a lot of. Of phone traffic, and so there was a lot of. I think we did over 400 inbound calls, which is a lot for us. There was over 1200 outbound calls. Calls, yeah. So it was a busy day.

Well, it's. It's a testament to how strong your team is. Do your agents like using Volley? I. Obviously, you know, Diane.

Yeah. This is one thing that I was a little concerned about at first, because, you know, anytime you introduce a new system on, Nobody likes change. Right. So I was a little concerned that, like, if. If they were doing 200 calls a day, I mean, they would just feel overwhelmed all the time. But I would say after the first week I started polling, everybody said, what do you think? Do you. Do you feel like this is much better? And everybody said, yes, it's much better. And I said, what do you like about it? They said, it's just much easier. I mean, literally before, they were manually dialing phone numbers and so just being able to. To have Volley feed them the next call, whether it's inbound or outbound. And I even spoke with a couple of them today who, you know, one of them was kind of saying, well, there's one thing I don't like about Volley is, you know, I'll get this. This call on this campaign, but then I get another one on this campaign for a different store, and I really have to pay attention. I was like, well, it's good. That's a good thing that you have to pay attention and make sure that you're, you know, you're. You're keeping your mind sharp, you're staying focused on what's going on. She's like, it definitely does help keep you focused.

So.

But I don't know of anybody that would want to go back to the old way. Nobody wants to do it, and now they're just used to it. You know, another thing that I noticed, too, we. We work in shifts. So the first shift comes in at 7am they leave at 4, and then 8 to 5, and then 9 to 6, and we. Our BDC closes at 6pm I. It used to be that that last shift, things would really slow down. They weren't really doing a lot of outbounds. There wasn't many inbounds coming in. And that last hour would be kind of coast. You know, they just coast all the way to the end. Now we close at 6pm and they're still on calls at 6, 10, 6, 15, because they have just been on the phone constantly. And until then, volleyball shut off at 6pm so it's not delivering them any more calls. They're. They're literally just time, you know, finishing up that last call. But it's. That was almost unheard of before. Like, nobody was here after 6pm because they had finished 20 minutes before that. They really were just sitting there, you know, chatting amongst themselves. So it's, it's. It's made the most out of every hour and every minute and every hour.

What. What do you like most about it as. As, you know, the BDC manager?

Well, so far, the reporting has been amazing, so. And I'm really looking forward to the whole new reporting setup. But what's in there right now is very. It's just. It, it's. It's very. It's very good for managing the group and managing production. It's a lot easier than it was before where we had to kind of piece everything together together. Having the live dashboards helps a lot. Right? So having dashboards that, that we can post on the wall and at a glance while we're out on the call floor, see what's going on, see who's, you know, who's struggling, who's not struggling, who's having a great day has been fantastic. But I have to tell you, every week that we meet with Caleb, we learn something new. And so I just. Being able to solve problems, like we come across a problem that we're not sure how to solve in Bali, and then being able to have that meeting with Kayla, what we did was we set up a shared onenote notebook with her and we just dump all of our questions into it. And then she'll go over that shortly before our weekly meeting and kind of have all her answers prepared and ready to go so that we're making the most efficient use of our time and just being able to have that. And then she's, you know, she shows us something new that we didn't know before on how to. On how to, you know, manage our group better. As a matter of fact, today we. She showed us how to dig into problems using Pulse, which I Didn't know that you could do, you know. So we've been using Pulse to help kind of gray calls and look at it from that standpoint. And we even loaded our own survey into Pulse so that we can use our grading system alongside of Pulse. She showed us how to use it as a diagnostic tool, which was. So now I'm looking forward to digging in and using that tool in a whole different way.

So you were telling me and Liza last week about your pacing goals for the agents. How did you come up with, you know, like you said, you might have been at one to one before. And, you know, I just looked, you know, that agent Diana yesterday, you know, she made 76 appointments. You know, she only took 46 inbound calls. So, you know, just to say the obvious, the rest of that 217 calls was all outbound, you know. So how did you come up with your pacing goals?

Well, so literally I just took it from other. Well, from, from what you guys were telling us, you know, when we were engaged in the sales process. But also, too, I went through and watched a lot of the Volley videos and a lot of the, the videos with, you know, Kim in Oklahoma and some of the other BDCs that you guys have, you know, in your group. And I kept hearing these numbers that, you know, I thought were kind of incredible. Gosh, I mean, can that really be done? And, you know, I, I had managed a automotive BDC prior to this one, and we were mostly inbound, but we were ecstatic. If everybody hit 65 calls in a day, you know, that was a good day. And so I, literally, the pacing was something that I got from hearing from you guys and from other groups. And then really what we did was we started, you know, I mentioned earlier, we started preparing them ahead of time. This is what's going to happen. So that mentally they would make peace with that. So that it wasn't all of a sudden, hey, we know we've only been asking you to do 65 calls a day, but now we're going to ask you to do 150. 50 a day. Right. Once we launched on a Bali. So we, we were preparing them ahead of time. And then we've been on Bali now for several months, and I, my, my focus was, okay, let's get, let's make sure that we're doing 100, 120 calls a day and make sure that's comfortable. And we're able to do that without any problem. And we hit that pretty early. But I, but I've let that kind of ride and kind of coast for a little bit. But now, as we're getting close to the end of the year, I'm starting to mentally prepare them now for what's coming next, which is 150 and then 200 calls a day. And I can tell you that I mentioned 150. It was just. It was Monday, Friday, Friday last week that we had a meeting with everybody and we told them about what's on tap for 2026, and that 200 calls a day is where we're headed. So 150 is the next step. And I was surprised quite a few of them started hitting 150 a day right away, you know, so. So that's. That's how we did it. We. We've just been stepping it up over several months, and I expect that through 2026, that 200 calls a day per person will be pretty normal.

Yeah, that's really high performing. We know it can be done. We, you know, obviously, as, you know, we say it during the sales cycle. We know it, but that is. That is pretty high performing. If you really had to tell someone who's looking at this, who's in your shoes, in your position, if you had to tell them one thing about Volley, I mean, what would be the one thing you'd tell them to look at?

I think the thing as far as, like, a feature in the system, or do you want to know?

I mean, what would be the most exciting thing, you know, if. If someone came to you and said, hey, what's your opinion? What's one thing I should know?

The one thing that you should know is if you are not hitting, you know, 150 calls per day per agent, and they're not closing 30, that was the other number that was astounding to me. It was 30. Then there's no question you should. You should invest in Bali. So, yeah, we hadn't talked about the conversion ratio, but the, the fact, I mean, before our conversion ratio, at best, four and a half percent.

On outbound.

On outbound? Yeah, on outbound. So it. To. To get to 30%, I. I really. I. I didn't believe that number, to be honest with you. I didn't think it was possible. But, you know, we hit it pretty quickly, you know, And. And like right now, last month, we ended at 34.5, and this month, right now, we're at 39. So I, I didn't think that it was. I didn't. I never thought we could hit numbers like that. Yeah, so. So that's What I would tell him, I said, you know, if. If you're looking to boost those kind of numbers. And, you know, because before I was. I was primarily an inbound call center, and we were doing some outbounds, but it wasn't, you know, we were a cost basically to the company. I mean, we were just a big expense. Now we're a profit center. You know, now we're driving business to the stores.

So.

So that's, It's. That's been a major shift for us.

Is, Is that something that. I mean, do you. Do you feel like you're getting recognition from the GMs and the service managers? You know that.

Yeah, when I ask about it, they say their traffic is definitely up. Yeah. So, yeah, we. I mean, they're. They're feeling it. So it, you know, it's been good from, from that perspective. And then, you know, the, the. I, I'd like. And I've mentioned this Kayla, so she's put in some requests. There's a few things that I'd like to get out of the reporting system that would give us a little bit better numbers on ROI and stuff. But. But I think, you know, they see traffic across the drive. That's the main thing. You know, they're. They're feeling it. So that's, that's been, you know, the biggest barometer, I think.

Well, good. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to do this. I, I do want to ask you before we go, what. And you've kind of touched on a lot of them, but what are your big goals for next year? We're coming into, you know, the end of the year, 20, 26 is starting. What do you hope to accomplish next year?

Yeah, so we've got three things that we're focused on. Obviously get, you know, the 150, 200 calls a day per agent is one of them. I actually wrote them up on my board. So we're looking now the focus is going to be on quality. So we've got the quantity in there now as. As I'm listening to calls as, you know, as we're grading calls now to raise the level of professionalism. And my team's professional, but I want it to be better. And there was a, you know, there was a video that you and Kim Grubb did where, where she was talking about, you know, that. How engaging they are on the phone and, you know, how she almost wants them to. To sing their, you know, their greeting and that sort of thing. That's where we're headed Next. So the next thing is, are we using power words? You know, okay is not okay. So are we using words like absolutely, certainly. You know, I'll be happy to help you with that. That sort of thing. And then. And then the final thing is. Is really having to do with volley, but it's product knowledge for my team on the products that we sell and service. So I want to get them a little bit more in depth on the. The issues that come up with these vehicles. We get, you know, sometimes we get operational questions on the vehicles and that sort of thing, and I want them to be able to speak a little bit more confidently about some of the things that they're hearing on the phone so that they don't have to stop the call, ask a question, feel like they have to transfer it to the store when it's something that maybe we can answer within the bdc. So my big thing is to cut the transfers now. So, yeah, yeah, we want to. We want to avoid having to transfer the customer if at all possible.

I'm sure you get a lot of status checks.

You know, we do now we don't get as many as we used to. We. We did push that back because we used to handle all of them, but we push that back on the stores. But I will say that, you know, that's determined by the ivr and so the customer, if they are checking status, they. They can hit a number and basically it goes to the store. But if they're not getting through, then they figured out, okay, if they press the number to schedule an appointment, they get to us, and then they'll get somebody that, you know, will have to handle their phone call. So we've noticed that's ticked back up again. So we're having to figure out a way to deal with that, because every one of those we take takes us away from, you know, making an outbound call, maybe two, three outbound calls, depending on how long we're on the phone with the customer. Customer. So. So that's going to be another thing, is we need to focus on making sure that the. The customers don't have to call and check status on their cars. And we put some things in place to kind of help with that. So now we just got to be able to maximize those things.

Yeah, we have some. Some strategies there. Scott is pretty opinionated when it comes to the status check calls. I will say, though, just listening to you, I think that is a. You know, the fact that you're seeing them go up is a testament to the fact that people know if they press, you know, two for service and one is scheduled, they know their calls are getting handled. Right. So, you know, everything has a. Has a bright side.

Well, you know, the other thing, too, and we didn't talk about this, one of the great things about Volley is if we miss a call, that call is now served back up to us, so we don't just miss it and maybe never get the customer back again. Now, now we've got an outbound call to make, you know, which is great. So that was a very manual process before, and it would get done if we could get it done, but admittedly, most times it probably wouldn't get done.

Yeah, the stats on that are pretty, pretty high. You know, you got to be getting to your. To your missed calls. So, Rob, thanks so much for taking the time. I really appreciate you sitting down to talk about your experience here.

Absolutely. It's been my pleasure.

Well, thank you so much for everyone tuning in, and I hope that you have a fantastic day.