By Angela Schlinz, BDC Director, Customer Traac

Specialties in the medical field are normal for those in the healthcare industry. Orthodontists focus on correcting teeth, and dentists make sure the teeth and gums in your mouth are healthy. Imagine if your eye doctor was also tasked with cleaning your teeth and making sure your knee injury is healing correctly. Or the person that schedules your appointment at the dentist also filled your cavities? These expectations may seem crazy, yet we do this every day in the auto business to the dismay of our customers. We expect our service advisors to provide stellar service and to be answering inbound appointment calls while trying to communicate with customers in for service on the status of their car.

Salespeople are expected to sell 15 cars a month, which puts them in front of customers around six hours a day and then to respond to 100 internet leads and follow up promptly with each one of those leads.

This is an ineffective communication model that is inconsistent and frustrating for our customers. How do we fix this? Where should you start? Simply put, just pick one! Start small and build to your needs for better results. 

Pick One. For many dealers, that is basic appointment confirmation calls on behalf of your sales team. For others, it is reminding customers they are due for service. Maybe your sales inquiries are hitting voicemail or your internet leads are sitting for hours waiting for dealer response. It happens to the best of the best. There are times where you can’t provide a consistent and timely response. 

You can start simply and continue to build from there.  Here are a few key areas to consider as a starting point:

• Sales and service appointment confirmation
• Missed or no show appointment communication
• First service appointment (after the customer has purchased a vehicle)
• Service reminder for maintenance that is due
• Sales lease renewal or equity mining
• Inbound sales and service call handling and appointment setting
• Internet lead management strategy

Consistency. The reason many dealerships fail at the basic “pick one” approach is that they are unable to consistently deliver on their commitment.  Dealerships can be a whirlwind on Monday mornings or during busy times. Ask yourself if you can consistently deliver on your “pick one?” If you find yourself in doubt, it might be more effective and less expensive to have an expert complete this task for you. You may be surprised that it will actually cost you less money than having your highly paid service managers, advisors or sales team do these “pick one” tasks.

Be Prompt: A recent Lead Response Management Study, found that the odds of making a successful contact with a sales lead are 100 times greater when a contact attempt occurs within five minutes of the inquiry as compared to 30 minutes after the lead was submitted. 

What’s even worse than a delayed response? The average number of times a lead is followed up with is 1.3 times. Not only are we not prioritizing these conversations, but we’re giving up after just one call? Two things that can bring added results are:

1. Urgency in response

2. Commitment to sales cadence.

Focus on your strengths-Hire for your weaknesses.  *Gallup analysis reveals that people who use their strengths every day are three times more likely to report having an excellent quality of life, six times more likely to be engaged at work, eight percent more productive and 15 percent less likely to quit their jobs. Employees who use their strengths at work are often more productive because the activities and demands of their job are more rewarding, which in turn leads them to try harder and succeed more often.  To put it simply, people are generally more effective and happier when they can focus on tasks that they are confident in and competent at completing. 

We should let our salespeople focus on developing relationships by focusing on and providing exceptional service to the customer in front of them.

Just think about that service advisor who has multiple status callbacks to complete and additionally has two customers waiting for updates in the lounge? Let’s stop initial appointment phone calls from distracting them from the customers that are needing updates for service on their cars. You may actually increase revenue and provide a better and more consistent communication strategy.  

Communicating the right way might just save you time and money.

*(Dr. James Oldroyd published the Lead Response Management Study)

About the Author

Angela began her Automotive career in 2001. She spent 18 years immersed in dealership operations of both sales and service BDC. Most recently Angela built and managed a successful business development department for a large automotive group. Her knowledge of handling dealership communication strategies along with people and processes is her recipe for success. Angela’s goal is to help her partners achieve greater variable and fixed operations success through driving additional business all while providing the highest quality of customer service.