Volie Gives Fred Beans The Tools They Were Lacking - with JulieAnn Falls

Hello, everyone. Welcome back to another Volley rally. Excited to have Julianne Falls with the Fred Beans Group here on with us today to talk about her experience with Volley. Julianne, how's it going today?

Very well, thank you for asking. How are you doing?

Awesome. And maybe that's just because I don't look out my window and see a bunch of ice like you do. So it's pretty nice down here in Fort Myers. But anyway, really, really excited to. To have you on. Before we get to, you know, the topics for Volley, can you talk a little bit about your role in the. The Fred Beans Group for folks who don't know you?

Absolutely. So I am the BDC manager for the service side at Fred Beans, Fred Bean's family of dealerships. We have 23 dealerships along with some other entities that are out there, but I do all of the service appointments for all 23 dealerships. Prior to us beginning this in 2021, all of the appointment calls were fed into our advisors, our ASMs, and they were fielding the calls as well as dealing with the customers that were in front of them and also trying to follow up on warranty claims and sell additional services to customers. So we took that away from them and started this separate office. We're a centralized BDC for all 23 dealerships.

And can you talk about your motivations with getting started with Volley? You know, you started the BDC in 2021, so not that long after you, you then started with Volley. So what issues were you trying to solve for?

So when we first launched this back, it was end of November of 2021 when we first launched. We didn't have a whole lot of insight as to a phone system or even what our demands would be. So we had picked up a phone. Phone system that was very minimal. It was very bare bones. We had no reporting, we had no control, and it was a very difficult system to try to navigate. And again, we were brand new kind of up and coming. We had at that point three employees and five dealerships only. And we were struggling with keeping up or the. The system was struggling to keep up with our demand. So we quickly started to ask around to our other vendors and people in the industry, and Volley kept coming up as you got to check this phone system out. And it was very shortly after we met with Volley for the first time, saw the demo and what we could do, and immediately jumped on board and haven't looked back. As a matter of fact, I feel like we've continued to grow with Bali throughout the last couple of years.

And I think it's pretty safe to say that, I mean, we value the partnership too, but when you look at the fact that five stores now, 23 stores, and, you know, who knows where you'll be in a few years. But it's very obvious that your service business and your service BDC has done a great job of keeping up with that, with that growth there.

Absolutely. We have a volume of about a thousand inbound calls or a thousand calls one way or the other between 10001500 when you include our outbound efforts. We needed a system that could keep up with that, both with tracking the calls and having accessibility for myself to be able to pull things for quality as well as just keeping up with the demand, the cues and the control that we needed to have. And Volley stepped in and from the beginning really gave us those controls that we were lacking before. And it's.

It's been amazing back when I know it's been a little bit here, so you know how much you remember about it. But how was your experience with the onboarding with Volley?

So as we continue to grow and we're adding more rooftops and more campaigns all the time, it's been a minute since we've onboarded, but I can say onboarding an agent is as easy as the click of a button. Onboarding a rooftop is an organized process. I have an onboarding form that I just simply fill out. I get it to my representative who can get everything uploaded. The time, the turnaround time is fast. It's easy. I feel like it's minimal effort on my end. I just gather the information and what we need to plug in. So from my standpoint, it's almost a plug and play. I. I give the information that is on the form and everything gets uploaded. And for me, it's almost magical. Like I just turn over the paper and suddenly I have the queue built. So I can't stress enough that it was one of the less chaotic vendor setups that we've ever had to do. And we've, like I said, we started with five and we kept adding stores throughout the year. And we would just notify, hey, we've got a new store we're going to add on. Here's the date we'd get everything together and it really seemed very seamless and flawless.

And since launching, how's it been going for you? I mean, obviously well, but do you have any specific stats or anything that you want to speak to?

Statistically, I don't have specifics, but I can say that what was really, really Nice last year, 23, was the first year I had a full year of reporting from Bali. So come the end of the year, I was able to pull stats. And that's something I love about Volley, is the reporting aspect. I can pretty much pull a report on any kind of statistic that I could possibly find, and I could do it from a broad spectrum, and then I can just start to narrow that down to the nth degree if I need to. So with that and. And with those stats, I don't have specifics to share, but I can say that I was able to pull out. I can do month over month. I can do year over year. I can look at a specific agent or a specific campaign and see what it does and when it performs the best. So I look at my stats throughout the day, and I have a ton of stats that I run all of them. Everything I do is through Volley.

And you mentioned that at the start, when, when we were rolling on with you here, you had three, three agents when you started your bdc and, you know, you've then been growing and onboarding them is easy. But do they enjoy using Volley?

They do, actually. And those who were here when we first opened and remembered that first system that we struggled with really can. Can testify to the fact that life is very easy. They come in, they log in, their cues are all set for them, and it's called volley because it literally serves you the calls. So if there's nothing coming in, they get served and outbound automatically and really helped us expand and grow. When I asked them specifically about, you know, what is it that you like, most of them will tell you, I can disposition anything very specifically. It cuts down on my need to send emails to departments. We can manage all of that through VOLI and through our dispositions that we've set up through the program. It feeds their day to them and it's efficient. And my. My big thing and what they hear me say a lot is if you organize your day, you'll maximize your pay. And Volley kind of does that for them.

And what about the visibility, the accountability aspect of it? Do you feel like they enjoy knowing that they're being tracked there?

Absolutely. It gives them a sense of comfort and security. I think I'm able to pull calls when we have maybe something going on in a department, and they're like, can you check and see what was said on this call? We're able to stay in line. We have our information to back us up. But also the agents feel comfortable because they Know that as long as they continue to do the right thing, we have all the information to back everything that we do every day with those agents.

You know, you've grown your department so much. You were talking to me before we started recording here about now you're transitioning some of them to be working from home. Can you talk about that?

Absolutely. So as we've grown, we're almost going to outgrow our building. And a conversation was started with management on what we were going to do and what our plan of action was. And we decided to allow, for the first time in our family of dealerships, our team to go hybrid remote. So starting early February, we'll have agents that qualify. The stats are all trackable through Volley, which is what we built it around. There are four major stats that they have to maintain in order to be qualified. Qualified to go remote. And what's nice is Volley is web based. So really I can hand my agents a laptop, an extra monitor, a keyboard and a headset and they can work from home or from anywhere. And. And so it's going to open up a whole new door because I only have 12 seats in my room, but I'm going to need 16 or 20 people and I now have the ability to do that. And I think also with retention and everything else and the way that the working force is moving toward this was a step in the right direction. We could not have done it on our original system, I can tell you now, but Volley opened that door because again, not only can they track their stats and they know where they stand, but also I have confidence that the system, no matter where you are, is doing the right thing based on how we've asked it to. So as a manager as well, having people go remote, what is also exciting is Volley gives me the opportunity to allow this for the agents because I have access to everything from productivity percentage. I can live monitor at any time. I can even, you know, bump into a call if I had to if something was. Was going poorly. But I can look at all my stats, I see my drop rate, I see who's doing what. And Volley really makes it easy for me to manage my team no matter where my team is at. And so I'm looking really forward to this next step for my agents as well as us.

What would be the. If a dealer came to you and said, hey, I'm thinking about looking at Volley, what would be the most important thing that you would want them to take a look at?

This was a hard question because I do love Volley in So many different aspects. But if I had to narrow it down to one, I would say it's my campaign attempt management and the campaign performance report. And the reason I chose those two is because that gives me the ultimate control over what is going on in my room all the time. I can look at the campaign performance report, take a snapshot of a date range and see which has the what's a high converting campaign that we have loaded? Maybe what's a high contact rate. And that's always important too, right? You got to get your foot in the door in order to, to get them in into our door. So that allows me a little bit of control to dive deep and see, see what we're calling. I never want my agents to just be dialing a phone. I there has to be a reason to do so. And those reasons are looking at those high converting campaigns and making sure that we are calling the the appropriate things at the appropriate times. Those two things give me the utmost control. I love campaign performance or campaign attempt management report or screen because by the day I can turn things on, I can turn things off and it's literally just a click of a button. So I feel like all the control is, is at my desk at my fingertips. And again I use those two reports. In the last six months, we've seen our outbound campaigns be much more effective as soon as I started to utilize both of those together. And so weekly and definitely monthly I have a big sit down and look at all of the campaigns, but weekly I go in, I look at what we did the week before and really control my room based on what we're doing and what's converting the best.

That's awesome feedback. You know, I know that you've spoken with Scott in the past about how volley's helped you focus on inbound, you know, so it's great to hear that. You know, one of your focuses in the last six months like you said, has been to to grow that outbound effort and utilizing those. So that that's awesome feedback.

It's been a big shift because we have been able to sit back now and really dive into our outbound a lot heavier and a lot more in depth than we were in the past. We were able to handle all of our in inbound and just kind of stay on the the fringe of really hitting our outbound. But now outbound has taken a whole new life to itself. And part of the the ability to do that was that we had our inbound so organized with Bali and, and you know, got it Running really like a well oiled machine and we were able to turn our focus onto this. And so now I have two sides of this BDC that are both very successful. Both our inbound and our outbound efforts to bring those additional opportunities into the dealerships.

So with 23 stores, a lot of different brands you encompass there and in particular you have eight Ford stores. I know how does Volley help with any Ford initiatives or really other OEM initiatives that you have as well? But the, you know, the Ford too for sure.

So to focus on the eight Ford stores and that's the most dealerships I have of any one brand. So they definitely are very prominent in our Fred Beans family. And we are able through Volley to do a whole lot of things on behalf of Ford starting with from our auto attendant already introducing the remote experience and, and planting that seed in our customers minds to being able to do our premium pickup and delivery which was a new program that really launched hard in 2023. And we're able to do that with ease and help our departments out because it's honestly just a disposition that we do inside of Volley that immediately alerts our mobile coordinator in the dealership that we have a pickup and delivery and everything is able to be handled on that end. Pickup and delivery and mobile service both launched really hard in 20 and we were able to pick that ball up and run with it. And Volley was a huge contributor to that. Between dispositions and sending out the proper notifications to providing, you know, scripting to the agents and also being able to upload those campaigns. Maybe it was a recall. We wanted to get our mobile coordinator up and running with our service. So we chose the recalls that were mobile friendly and immediately got on the phone and started to coordinate that. So it's been a really exciting thing to see, see Ford kind of launch all these new programs and us be able to immediately say we've got a way to do this and it was successful from the beginning.

Is there anything, I mean that that's, that's great with the Ford and you know, I know that they really pushed their pickup program a lot. You know, I've heard that from a lot of other dealers too. So I, I love hearing that we've been able to help you stay on top of that. Is there anything with other OEM initiatives that obviously when we spoke about planning this, we talked about the Ford, but is there any, anything for any other OEMs that you care to mention that we.

The Vole helps with nothing as prominent as Ford because again I'VE got eight of those stores and nothing else as far as manufacturers compete with that in our family of dealerships. But we're able to do everything from our Toyota and our Volkswagen courtesy care, custom customer care programs, and make sure that people get in for those complimentary services. And we run that as a campaign to. To even our Genesis, maybe valets and. And pickup and delivery. So all of that encompassing and Ford really helped launch us to get those dispositions in line. Even though I have other dealerships that maybe use loaners and valets, in the past, those went to the coordinator automatically. The. The agents did not set those appointments. Once we knew it was a loaner or a pickup valet, most of the time those just went over to our concierge in that department. However, with Ford and with proving that we were successful on the Ford side, we're able now to book our loaners and valet services for our Volkswagens and for our Genesis and Lincoln. So it's been a big help. And a lot of that had to do with what we set up for Ford leads into what we can do for everybody else.

Awesome. Julianne, thank you so much for. For taking the time here. That was, I mean, a lot of excellent feedback and we very, very much so value the partnership here, too. It certainly goes both ways. Thank you so much for. For taking the time was, you know, we. We really appreciate it.

Jake. It's always a pleasure. And again, we're one of your biggest cheerleaders. I feel like we have watched you've watched us grow, and we've watched you grow, and we've kind of grown together. I'm very excited to see not only where Fred Bean' dealerships ends up in a few years, but also where Bali takes us. So I do appreciate all of the support. Always.

Awesome. Thank you so much. And to everyone who tuned in today, really appreciate it. Let us know if you have any questions or anything like that, and have a fantastic day.