Volie Rally: Joe Cooper's Service BDC

Foreign.

For another volley rally today. Today I have Kim Grub with me, the director of communication and customer success at the Joe Cooper Auto Group. Hi, Kim. How are you doing?

Hi, Scott. I'm doing great. How are you?

Good. And by the way, if there's a different face, it's because you didn't get Jake today. You guys are stuck with me. So I hope that's okay. But I think we've got a great guest today. We get a lot of people asking, what's a typical day in the life of. Of, you know, running a service? BDC, which is one of the 45 things that, that Kim does for the sealer group. What's. What's a typical day like for you, Kim?

Well, you know, we're. We're open since we're fixed operations. We're open, of course, when the fixed departments are from seven to six. I've got currently a team of nine that handle all of the incoming scheduling and just general questions for all eight of our rooftops. And along with just taking calls, you know, we've got a lot of things that we need to make calls about getting people back in. We consider ourselves like the shrimp net that goes behind everything else and picks up the little bit of pieces that might be getting left behind, which are reminding customers that it's been seven months since their appointment last and things like that.

What about you? Are you. Are you printing off a lot of spreadsheets? Are you. What is your typical day like with these guys?

My day starts off with I'm very pro. Informative. I guess that that's even a sentence. But I want them to be as informed as I am because we are a team together. And without everybody being as committed and bought in to helping this dealer group grow, it's not going to work. And so first thing I do when I get here in the mornings is look at the previous day, kind of get a recap of what we did, and I'll give just a brief synopsis of, hey, so and so had the most appointments. You know, we do a little bit of brag session and or so and so made the most calls, and then I give them their monthly stats. Usually it used to take me about half a day to get everything together because I would have to go into so many different programs and sections of programming to get all of the different operational pieces that we use. Now it takes me about an hour and 15 minutes to get my entire team individually and group with where they're at right now as opposed to their goals, what they're tracking for in every single parameter. And our parameters that I compensate off of are of course appointments scheduled and appointments created for the month show rate. That's very important. Number of outbound calls that have been made and the number of outgoing appointments that have been made and those outgoing appointments. That's what I refer to as the shrimp net.

What I guess how is, how has your day changed? Post volley we get a lot of prospects. Ask us, you know what, what's my job like as a manager?

Well, what I have found is with the dashboards, especially with the live dashboard, and I can see the agent, I can pull my agent activity report and it's up to the minute anytime and see what's going on. Are we getting a lot of calls in, you know, who's, you know, taking all the calls? Why are they? Who's not? You know, it just gives me a better idea of what's going on in my room. Even though it's, it's right next door and I hear them all day long. I don't really, didn't really before have a grasp of who was individually doing what and how successful were they. It's given me the opportunity to find out, okay, this agent has made the same amount of outbound calls as this agent, but this agent has a 10% conversion rate and the first one only has a 1%. Something's wrong. And I can go through, listen to her outbound calls, figure out what's wrong and increase her productivity within five minutes. Just coming in and saying, okay, this is where I think we need to improve. And it's made me a better manager as far as they know that I do know what's going on. And then I, you know, am aware of every single thing that's happening, what their struggles are, and I'm there with an answer. But a lot of times before they even have come to me with a question. So it's made my job easier as far as coaching. Being a better mentor and being able to see all of that information just so clearly has really made a big difference for me.

Well, I mean you're kind of a next level manager with, you know, in this space and, and I, I would consider pre volley and post volley. Just very buttoned up, you know, it is, it has eliminated a lot of the manual work printing lists and, and so that you can spend your time doing these things that managers can really impact the business.

Absolutely. I print nothing now. I mean before, you know, our manufacturer, all of our manufacturers have lists. You know, these are the customers whose Cars have told us that their service is due and every single one of our makes has that. And they weren't being utilized or worked the way that they should have been in the easiest manner. Because, you know, how can I tell what the results of a call were if I print out this five page sheet with 20 leads on each page, hand it to somebody and say, hey, I need these people contacted. They need to come in for service, of course, telling us it's due. Whereas now I pull it up through the manufacturer website, download it into an Excel spreadsheet, upload it into my Volley campaigns and they get it in real time right now, while it's relevant. And I know the outcome of those calls and how successful or unsuccessful those lists can or cannot be.

You're having a pretty good year too, aren't you?

Yeah, yeah, I am having a pretty good year.

What are your goals for the rest of the year?

My goals for the rest of the year? Well, kind of starts with the end of last year. We, we started with Sadie and you and Bali in I think, September. And you know, at first, honestly I was hesitant because we were doing a great job with the tools that we had and our conversion rates were good and I just didn't really think I was almost making that crucial mistake that managers will make of I already know the best way to do this and I was proven wrong. So since we came on our Outbound, just our let's just take outbound appointments, they have doubled and our conversion rates have gone up 3% in both overall conversion and conversion from contacted customers. So we're getting better leads because I'm now able to choose what comes to me and we know what's not successful. Everybody knows in their own dealership what are the most successful ones? What are your high payoff activities? And we've gleaned it down to where we're trying to focus on just those high payoff activities and maybe tweaking and figuring out why the low payoff activities, Arlo. And we've done a bit of that and I'm going to tell you, I there's 40% of probably the entire offering that Volley gives us. As far as emailing and texting that I'm not even using yet, we're just strictly making these leaps and bounds through just phone calls. For instance, we're up 59% in overall outbound appointments year over year for. And that's the average for the past three months. January, February and December. It's our calls. We used to average about 3,000 outgoing calls a month. And, you know, I had to rely on my team having the integrity whenever it's slow, to jump into another program where they can't take incoming calls because they're doing outbound calls, because they've got a phone up to their ears. Now there's none of that worry, because if there's not an inbound call coming, here comes a lead for an outbound call. And so therefore, our outbound calls have gone from an average of 3,000amonth, and that's the average. Some months we did really well, and some months we did poorly because staff will fluctuate. Now we're averaging 5020 calls outbound a month with nine people and booking anywhere from four to 500 appointments a month from those. So that's a pretty good conversion. We've got currently 8% conversion off of just the outbound call leads. And then we actually connect and speak to a human 30% of the time. Of those 30% calls, our conversion rates 21%. It's just. It's a great process. And I combined it with the process that I already had of heavily scripting heavily, knowing what everybody's saying, making sure nobody's out there winging it, because when I know that they're doing things by the process, I can back them up 100%. And when they know that I've got their back, they're more productive. And so it's just been amazing for us. And my higher ups are starting to raise up their heads and go, wow, we. We thought we were doing good before.

So one of the neat things is you have time to do other things. What other projects are you going to be working on this year right now?

What I'm going to be working on this year, now that my afternoons are getting to where they're almost free, is part of my job is, you know, making sure that processes are followed throughout all the dealerships. I haven't been able to go to our eight locations like I had before when we first started this, and nobody knew what was going on. But then as we got busier and busier, it required me to be in this chair so much. And now I'm able to go do dealership visits, do a lot of what I do as far as customer service improvement and CSI and things like that. Just figuring out where we're missing and having the opportunity to pinpoint that to the managers and work on it together so that everyone's happy customers coming in along with the customers that are being called.

Oh, that's. It sounds fun.

And it.

And it's. Let's face it, it's fun to do. Do different things and. And not feel like you've lost track of what you're doing.

This is true. And, you know, I've never been in 23 years in the car business, this is the most I've been at a desk the whole time. You know, I'm used to being a service manager and running around all the time, and it. It just has been a different adjustment for me. And so now I'm backup. Since we're so efficient, I'm back up to running around like I like to do and getting to make sure that I'm there for anybody that needs me. I can help them with their capacities. I can see what's going on. Do you need more appointments? Oh, you're too busy at this point. Let's slow you down just by observing their drives. And a lot of times it's just a matter of, hey, can you get us some more work? And my response is, hey, can you get me some leads and I'll get them called? So. And.

And getting you out of the desk helps you avoid those very dangerous desk chair accidents that people can have. Right? We'll leave that story for another time.

Yeah, let's. Let's not go into that story.

Well, good. Well, Kim, thanks for taking a few minutes for the volley rally this week, and.

My pleasure.

You do a great job. We're just lucky to be able to work with you. I know Sadie loves working with you, and have a good afternoon. Thank you.

Thanks, Scott.

Bye.