Nearly 80 percent of customer touchpoints at a typical new car dealership begin with a phone interaction. If you, as a leader want to positively impact customer experience at your dealership, stop everything else and please start with the phones.

In order to have a meaningful and a long lasting impact on your customer experience strategy, the first and foremost step would be to better understand your organization's own unique "phone culture" or DNA.

I think most GMs, Service Directors, and other leaders would agree with me when I say: Every store is a unique eco-system with a unique business DNA. See picture below for illustration.

The best way to start towards understanding your own "phone culture'" or DNA, is to first identify what's working and what's not. Improve what's working and change what's not. This is a novel approach currently not practiced in the industry.

Decoding your dealership's existing "phone culture" will reveal a few measures you can take immediately to see lift in customer experience. Is it the phone setup, process, people or pay? At any rate you will be able to laser in on concrete actions to take right away to see tangible results.

We at Callsavvy call this decoding of new car dealership's own "phone culture": "Phone Performance DNA Assessment". If conducted the correct way with diligence and detail it deserves, your dealership will be able to answer the critical questions of whether a Service BDC pencils at your store, and most importantly which type: Onsite,offsite, hybrid.

Regardless of whether your dealership currently has a Service BDC, considering one or you think you cannot afford one. Once you conduct a Phone Performance DNA Assessment, it will reveal answers which may totally surprise you. It is an absolute pre-requisite to implementing any customer experience (CX) strategy for Fixed Ops.

The power of knowing how your dealership ticks is immeasurable. For instance, some dealerships may be surprised to find, that with just a few tweaks to your phone setup and current process, your team might be able to drastically reduce excessive phone ringing, relieve call-traffic bottlenecks and minimize missed and mishandled calls, and all that before spending a dime on a Service BDC solution.

Now that your team sees that a Phone Performance DNA Assessment is a must-do for every dealership regardless of which Service BDC cycle you're in, it is pertinent to say that there are four main components of a successful Phone Performance DNA Assessment and they are:

1. Phone Culture & Data Asessement
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7.  - Monetizing your calls
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9.  - Service BDC feasibility -
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11. Service BDC proof-of-concept

These critical components above will assist in understanding your dealership's true missed call revenue impact, which type of Service BDC to switch to or launch, how much to invest if internal, what to pay for it if third-party, which processes, and which team members are the weakest link needing training and coaching and inversely which the strongest needing recognition.

The Service BDC proof of concept will help your team build a Service BDC blueprint which is elastic and durable. Your Service BDC should grow with your business and should grow your business, not break with increasing scale.

In conclusion let me say this: Seeing the amount of work each leader puts in their dealership day-in-day-out, there is no doubt in my mind that he/she is in for a long-haul. So, keeping that fact in mind let us ensure long term success for your dealership in times of dizzying disruptions. I am a firm believer that the elixir to phone performance excellence and Service BDC success lies within each dealership's wealth of talented team members, from top-to-bottom

One of our jobs at Callsavvy is to hightlight what your team already does well and build a blueprint behind it. As to what is not working currently, there is a wealth of knowledge we have accumulated over the years working with dealers nationwide, putting us in a very advantageous position to share those nuggets with you.

Here are three additional benefits of conducting a Phone Performance DNA Assessment at your dealership.

• It will help with negotiating a more accurate pricing model from third-party vendors and guide through Service BDC installation process, whether onsite or offsite.
• It will help define what longterm success should look like for a Service BDC at your dealership.
• It will act as an insurance policy against a catastrophic Service BDC failure. Whether onsite, offsite or hybrid.

Call us and find out how your dealership does not have to be our paid client to benefit from our novel approach.

We are here to serve and build long term relationships.

Joe Tareen

Chief Consultant

www.Callsavvy.io

ph: (214) 945-4734

email: joetareen@callsavvy.io