Auto dealers cannot ignore the phone. Though digital as well as in-person communication are important, inbound phone calls to car dealerships are the second-most-common way that customers initially contact automotive dealers.
Once you can ensure that employees are picking up the phone every time it rings, you must also ensure that they are delivering a great phone experience to potential car-buyers. If you are spending money on marketing to make the phone ring, it is vital to capitalize on those hard-earned leads. It’s time to stop treating a ringing phone as a nuisance to the dealership.
Inbound phone leads should get treated the same as a lead that walks into your dealership.
Following are three tips to improve phone performance at your dealership.
1. Maximize your phone answering.
How many of your phone calls go unanswered or get mishandled every day? If you don’t know, you need to start getting informed.
You want to give every caller the same kind of attention as you would to a lead walking into the showroom. You wouldn’t ignore someone in your dealership, so why are you ignoring a ringing phone and a potential lead?
Make sure you answer every phone call and that your IVR routes correctly. Leaving a caller in phone limbo on hold or transferring to a voicemail is the same as ignoring the call completely. Give your callers the respect and attention they deserve.
2. Track and record employees’ phone calls for performance evaluation.
Utilizing a call tracking service that records calls and delivers phone handler performance data won’t only help you discover your inbound phone call rate and answering percentage, but it will also help you benchmark employees’ skills and set future KPI’s. Having real data to look at will aid in making smart decisions, rather than assuming that everything is running as planned.
When you are using analytics to determine phone performance, you can make an improvement plan to increase phone skills and set more appointments, leading to more sales for your dealership. And when recent automotive inbound call data shows that 80 percent of inbound sales calls to dealerships do not result in the caller’s commitment to come into the dealership, you can’t afford to ignore less-than-great phone skills.
3. Provide phone handlers with call cheat sheets and scheduling abilities.
While phone scripts are helpful, you don’t want employees relying on a script during every call and sounding robotic or unnatural.
Create some cheat sheets for phone handlers to use on calls with talk tracks for different phone situations and conversations. Help your employees to be successful in gaining the caller’s commitment to come to your dealership, rather than ending the call with the potential for them to call your competitor.
By keeping accountable to focus on improving your dealership’s phone skills and working on internal performance, you will improve your brand experience and increase sales – start reaping the benefits now.
About the Author
Cassie Ciopryna is the Marketing Communications Specialist at CallSource, the company that invented call tracking and has over 1 billion phone calls tracked. As a content writer, she always strives to deliver the most useful and knowledgeable new information to readers.
