When you think about “why” customers choose a dealership and what you can do about it, the one thing to focus on is going to be providing outstanding customer service.

Customers choose a dealership based on one or more of these attributes: Price, Experience, Reputation, Location and Availability. Even Loyalty doesn’t make this list because they chose you to begin with, based on one of these attributes, and loyalty is just the benefit of your continuing to meet or exceed their expectations.

Exceptional service is the only thing your employees should be focused on, because they can’t control anything else.

One - Your employees don’t control price. The market controls price. Sure you can create a perception that you’re cheaper than your competitor, and that’s good. It creates an opportunity for your employees to provide great customer service. They don’t set the prices though; the willing customer has the final say on price.

Two - It’s not your location that matters; it’s the customer’s location. (Think about it.) Your employees have no control over either.

Three - Your employees don’t control the availability of products or services. Again, the market controls availability through demand, which motivates the manufacturer to create the supply or you to invest in the service through buying equipment and hiring and training employees. Your employees don’t decide what to put in to inventory or the menu of services you provide.

Four - Your reputation precedes you. Your employees certainly influence the future of your reputation but whatever’s out there at the time a customer makes a decision is out there. You can’t change that and neither can your employees.

Five - So it brings us down to the one remaining attribute of dealership selection – the experience. However, the term experience is too broad. We need to narrow it down to what it really is, the quality of interaction with the customer. Maybe it’s in the showroom or service lane, or maybe not. More interaction with customers happens on the phone than any other method. (Check it out. Add up all your service ROs, your showroom ups and your website visitors for a month; then compare that to the number of times your phone rings and all the outbound calls coming from your dealership. See what I mean?)

Customer service is the only constant too. Prices and availability fluctuate. Your reputation has ebb and flow and customers move around both in where they live but also where they work. The quality of interaction is a real time continuous indicator of how you’re doing.

We pretty much think the car business is about selling and servicing cars. Like any business, the car business, is about customer service.

How easy is it for your customers to schedule a service appointment on the phone at your dealership? Are there long hold times or calls going to voicemail? Does the person answering the phone have a customer standing in front of them as well? Are customers calling multiple times just to get through to someone who can schedule their appointment?

If any of these situations are occurring a variety of problems can be created. For one, a missed sale! Or you may have a customer who is trying to get in for the first time and gets turned off and goes elsewhere.

The implications are easy to spot. Missed revenue and poor customer satisfaction.

Unfortunately, eliminating those situations isn’t even enough.

 If your ease of scheduling is good, then you are behind your independent and non-OEM franchise competitors. Both sectors have very easy appointment scheduling experiences for their customers.

Service scheduling is very much a People + Process kind of thing.

Here are some steps to take to create a great customer experience when scheduling appointments at your dealership.

Let’s start with the people, specifically how many people are needed to achieve some simple goals when it comes to call handling.

A Service BDR who is only taking inbound service calls can handle about 150 calls a day at the high end, and 100 on the lower side. Our agents are in the queue on average 6.5 hours a day. Breaks, stopping to follow up on something, updating CRM or calls from the service department account for the rest of their 8 hours.

There is a very important metric for this call volume to work and that is the agents average talk time (ATT). For an agent to handle 23 calls an hour he or she would need an ATT of 2 1/2 minutes or less.

You should also monitor your hold time or time in queue. The easiest way to lower time in queue is to lower ATT. That is if you have the right number of agents. When we see agents talk time go up, or see they were on a call for eight minutes, we take action. First, we just listen to some calls. Some customers are long winded, but they are a scant few in the scope of hundreds of calls a day. Usually, the agent is off process and/or is all of the sudden a backyard mechanic way too in-depth in a conversation about the car or the work that is needed.

Another way to help with hold time is to offer customers an online scheduler. Show it to them when they take delivery and remind them of the online scheduler in your on-hold messages.

An acceptable average hold time is 30 seconds. This keeps the scope of the process at 1:00 minute on the high side and 0 minutes on the low side.

With this information and your call volume and call times, you can calculate how many service BDR’s you need and when to schedule them.

Conversion of calls to appointments should be in the 85% range but we see them regularly in the 65% range at some dealerships. The better job you do routing only appointment opportunities to the BDR the better the conversion is going to be.

The people in the process have to be trained. It is also very important that they are friendly, cheerful people who aren’t bothered by the repetition of the job and basically see themselves as a helper. These characteristics make customers feel good and your agent just might make somebody’s day!

Now let’s talk about the process and creating an exceptional customer experience when scheduling service at your dealership.

Use a call guide and follow it on every call. Design a service call guide that hits the process steps but gives the agent the flexibility to be themselves on the call.

The process steps look like this:

1. Greeting and Intro
2. Acknowledgement
3. Identify Your Customer
4. Confirm contact information
5. Confirm the vehicle and ask what service is needed.
6. Set the appointment
7. Recap the appointment
8. End the Call
9. Update CRM
10. Confirm the Appointment

We also talk about other process things that enhance the experience and improve customer satisfaction.

• Use the customer’s name up to three times during the call. The first time might be when they give you their name - just say “Hi Dave, how can I help you today.” At the end of the call use their name when you recap the appointment: Ok Dave, I’ve got you all set for…
• Always tell them you can help them (right away).
• When customers have a breakdown, car won’t start, they are stranded or complaining about something they have already paid to have fixed, show empathy. “I’m sorry to hear that, I’ll do everything I can to help you.”
• When customers say thank you, you say my pleasure.
• When customers ask for more information, you say certainly
• When customers give you information, you say thank you.

Service scheduling is order taking. People are on the go! Your customers want knowledgeable agents who can take care of them in a timely manner.

This process works in everyones favor. First of all, it’s on point with the customer. The customer thinks “wow” that was easy or even better “wow, that lady/guy was awesome.”

Secondly, it sets a lot of appointments!

We could do a lot of math to figure out what ease of scheduling is doing to your business. But it’s not necessary. If customers are on hold for minutes at a time, having to call more than once, getting sent to voicemail or being routed to the wrong person, you are missing opportunities to grow your business and improve CSI.

For a free copy of our standard Appointment Scheduling Call Guide you can download it here.