We recently chatted with Gary Graves, CEO of TotalCX, about the current state of call management and how he sees the future.

How has AI impacted the Call Management category?

AI, when used responsibly, will take data context, whether it's historical or in the moment, and provide insights that would be cost-prohibitive for a company to employ people to do. So if you take like the mundane process of crunching a lot of information to determine whether the outcome of an event happened or not, now that's a good way to depict how a lot of companies are using AI and how we're using AI today.

There are also companies that are using A.I. to provide a pass-through service such as chatbots and even phone engagement through artificial intelligence. And that has been necessitated by a lack of proper process for handling consumer inquiries.

We've all bought a car. And, you know, that process can be extremely cumbersomel. Even when it gets to the service side, it's always hard to get someone on the phone. It's usually a broken process that creates that.

That broken process creates an opportunity for A.I. to create a handling system for people to be serviced by a machine immediately versus waiting on hold and having a poor experience to talk to a human.

How can AI enable proactive call monitoring?

I'm not sure how many providers are doing that, but we've been doing that for quite some time. I think that a lot of them are doing it on the on the post-call side, which is good because what was being done prior was sending dealers conversations and recorded calls over to third-world countries where they could have low-cost labor to provide a price point that the dealer could stomach. They're at a great price point and I expect there to be a lot of derivative products that come down the line as a lot of these companies start to take ownership of their own AI journey.

You'd be surprised at how many companies in our space are now using, you know, ChatGPT or some derivative of Openai's or another platform that's very similar service versus investing in the talent and infrastructure, and they kind of take ownership of that model. And when you first see that is when these companies have a white outage. And if ten companies in automotive that are having issues with their servers at that time, you'll know they are.

How is TotalCX building their AI?

Well, I mean, I mean, let's face it, you know, the funding that OpenAI had to build is ridiculous. We can't we can't even begin to compete. But at the same time, there are a lot of open-source starting points. I'm going to give away some trade secrets here, so this is an exclusive for you guys. One of the things that we do is we take a hybrid approach. Instead of using these models to serve our customers or to serve our business processes directly, we use them to generate additional data that we train on. We train our own models on the data generated by these commercial models in addition to the data that we have from our own operations.

So we kind of have the best of both worlds. We have the organic, grassroots data that's indicative of the way our customers operate. And we also have the shiny new object version of it with all the bells and whistles that enriches the data. So we kind of take a hybrid approach.

Are customers comfortable communicating with AI?

If they can get what they need in a matter of minutes 3 minutes with the machine versus 9 minutes or 12 minutes or three callbacks with the human, obviously they're going to be better served by the machine. Ultimately, the best experience, though, is that when they call, they speak to someone who can help them immediately.

And that's good for all parties because now the relationship like a machine will not or the chatbot or voice bot will not perpetuate a relationship. It will facilitate the delivery of a service or establishment of an appointment and things like that. But in terms of brand building, driving customers toward loyalty building, that is something that always will have to have a human touch. And there's never going to be someone to refer to. No one says, "Yeah, you should call my machine. Over here at ABC Motors, They get my oil changed much quicker and lower cost."

What are the shortcomings of AI communication today?

Consider a scenario where someone is calling in on a recall on their vehicle and they're in the third year of the finance on that vehicle. When they're calling in because of that recall there's a chance that they're coming up their three years and they may want to transition to a new vehicle. So they may ask the question or that may be a conversation that leads to the discussion of that potential opportunity in a subsequent transfer to sales. I can't see that happening in a known AI service, you know, voice bot scenario.

What are common issues dealers have with their phone processes?

So there are a couple of different categories. So the first one is a process issue, and the process issue is typically one where they call in, they get placed on hold. They're on hold for a while and then they hang up, they call back and they ask again and then they get transferred to voicemail. They just never end up getting routed to the proper place. So that typically is a process issue in terms of how those calls are handled.

The other thing is customers having to exert an undue amount of effor to be a customer at a dealership. There are even conversations where the customer reminds the the person they're talking to, Hey, I'm the customer here and I have to call back three times in order to speak to the service manager because my car is supposed to be ready two days ago." You hear these types of conversations a lot.

So the majority of it is a lack of responsiveness, which is typically associated with a process issue of how their phone menu is set up. You press one to get here, you press three to get there. So they call back again and you hear or you have calls where the customer will state. I called back three times. I've been on hold for 12 minutes.

When you have a customer telling you about their experience in a way that's not positive, not only are they telling you, but they're also going to express their discontent when it comes to referrals or the next time they buy a car, like I'm just never going there again, or they may just take their service business elsewhere, which will also mean when the time comes to roll that vehicle, they're not going to roll it at that dealership.

How has COVID impacted dealership phone processes?

There's a friend of mine has a saying. He's an industry veteran and he says that good habits are developed in bad times and bad habits are developed in good times. So the inventory shortage, chip shortage, and everything that happened post-COVID and during the market adjustment and all the record-breaking profit that the automotive retailers experience, I mean, I think that could be called a good time.

You know, so a lot of bad habits were cultivated because they didn't have to have a lot of effort. People were buying cars sight unseen especially trucks, because there was just a tremendous shortage. Now we have dealership groups that are calling us now that the feeding frenzy is over and they're trying to improve their customer experience because they're having a large number of disgruntled customers all associated with the level of service they receive and responsiveness to service concerns.

How vendors can help with phone processes

I think there are vendors in the space that are, looking to help a lot of it. This isn't a new problem. This cycle, it happened during Cash for Clunkers and any other type of market event that changed the dynamic of supply and demand.

So we're here again. And I think that it's up to us vendors who are in the sales cycle for our car dealership customers to innovate and help them toe the line on their processes and tighten them up. And I think, you know, now dealers are becoming more receptive to it.

How does TotalCX approach phone training?

We approach it internally first and foremost because we have to eat our own dog food. That's why we changed our name. And now we've created a Chief Experience Officer position and all of our customer success people became Experienced Managers because if we want to teach something, then we also have to live with those same values.

So in terms of phone training, the first thing to do is to have a baseline. You have to understand what you're dealing with because not every dealership has the same issues or the same problems. So establishing a baseline and analyzing calls by department for a week or so will give you a good baseline to understand, you know, what's happening with that dealership.

You don't want to put a Band-Aid on it or some Novocaine or just smooth the issue over. You want to get down to causality. What is the root cause of this issue and what can be done to address it? This is sometimes it's as much as a cultural issue that stems from the top-down management style in automotive that's been pervasive for years, where the GM is driving down to the sales manager, this is your number. You hit this number. You'll make this number or find a new job. That translates down to the salespeople who have the same mindset. If it doesn't seem to be a promising opportunity or profitable deal I'm not going to give it a lot of attention. That means that the value of each customer is now being read by the salespeople.

This is all stuff that you can see and measure based on, you know, the conversations and the outcomes from these types of transactions. But we really have to understand the root cause. So we always start with root cause analysis and then, you know, create a custom approach to helping that dealership group, you know, solve their issues.

The importance of phone analytics

I think that there are more numbers than just op line and gross profit that matter and also indicate health and growth. If you think about it in any car dealership, most of them have a six-figure per rooftop marketing budget, or something even more than that.

So they spend all this money to create all this opportunity. And how much money and effort do they spend to ensure that they're handling that attention, that traffic that they paid for to produce the outcome that they're actually trying to get? So they're paying attention to spend over here, and the outcome over here in terms of the balance sheet.

But all the things that happen in between, that's where the CRM companies and companies like us come in to try to help give additional context and perspective of what's happening between those two milestones.

What are successful dealers doing today?

They're they're a little more progressive. So we also use Google Analytics inside of our platform to understand, you know, user adoption, how our dealers use our platform so we can see what areas they leverage, what areas they don't, and in what frequency to help us create a better platform and also to give our Experience Managers some context and to help advocate for better usage.

But the people who are the raving, die-hard fans are the people who use the platform in totality. And one of the downsides of our platform is that it's powerful. We have the richest analytical offering in automotive hands down. And the problem for that is that there isn't necessarily a person or a job position in a dealership that has trans-departmental powers to fully leverage the platform.

You have all these different stakeholders who may or may not work together productively like they're supposed to inside a dealership. So the dealership groups that have the most invested into our platform are the people who have empowered someone to go across sales, finance, and service and parts to make sure that all of these departments are, meeting the same bar of customer service and customer experience.

How should dealers use an outsourced BDC?

I don't think it's a long-term solution because I think that at the end of the day, you want the dealership to own the relationship. Our outsourced BDC is a domestic product, meaning all of the agents are American citizens working here, typically in a contiguous 48, and they all handle typically like overflow while a dealer has a moment to take a breath and try to design a better process or a better outcome.

It may be because they're buying stores hand over fist because there are a lot of transitions in the marketplace right now. And so as they're onboarding all of these dealerships, there tends to be processes that are broken in this new acquisition. And the best way to fix it temporarily is to just outsource it to ABC.

And then we'll kind of walk that back as we help them establish and stand up the proper processes to support it themselves. So think of it kind of like roadside assistance, if you will, for overflow phone calls for dealership service and sales.

AI is going to change everything

Yeah, I tell you, A.I. is going to change everything. It's going to change the world. Specifically to our market, The things that we've been doing since our initial partnership with Google back in 2017, when we brought live transcription like transcribing a call as is happening with keyword alerts. For example, if somebody says the safe words "pepperoni pizza", t somebody gets a text message. Like so we've been doing that for a long time.

And we had, you know, we had a technology advantage over our competitors because they just couldn't seem to get there. But now just like like that, you know, they're there, but not because of their own innovation. It's because the climate has totally changed, which is awesome, because now that applies pressure to everyone in the marketplace to continue to innovate in order to differentiate and disrupt and stay relevant.

And for us, like that's that's that's the kind of pressure, you know, we respond to. So it's gonna be pretty fun.