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.