This is the 2nd article in the series Manage Your BDC like a Call Center:

As call volume increases you will find that your basic phone system is quickly becoming a major source of profit leakage.  How can you measure profit leakage in a BDC without a more modern phone system? Call the dealership yourself once a day asking the common questions your customer ask everyday.  You should also take a look at how many inbound calls came in versus being logged.  If you are using tracked local and toll free numbers on all of your customer facing marketing and communication you can make an effort to listen to these calls.  Keep in mind there is something wrong with nearly every call you will hear, so try not to over-react. Unfortunately it is going to be very hard as it will lack the tracking capability some very basic phone systems can.

So, is there a better way to handle calls then every phone in the department ringing at once until someone grabs a phone...yes and its called automatic call distribution or an ACD. 

Technology makes this inspection very easy. Your phone tracking and reporting infrastructure needs to be 100% custom to your business.  The metrics in this article are for phone systems with an ACD.  This type of phone system delivers calls to agents based on logic and availability.  So what is and ACD and what makes is so much better?  An ACD is software and hardware that is installed locally or hosted remotely designed to handle all of your incoming calls by distributing them in a more controlled streamline way.  The software allows for separate rules for different types of calls as well as situations.  Here are a few examples.

• You have 7 dealerships and you want all of the calls for your Honda dealership to be answered by your 4 Honda trained BDC reps (called skill based routing).  The calls for the Honda dealership are routed to a range of ACD groups designated for this store (basically a bank of local DIDs) that have rules built in to send the call to the agents that are Honda certified.  The system will automatically 'see' who is available of the 4 and send the call there.  If all of the 4 agents are unavailable we can setup a backup plan to roll the call to another team of agents (called a roll-over team).
• You have a BDC of 12 reps and you want more calls to route to the highest performers. Simple, ACDs have what is called priority based routing where you can set everyone on your team a level.  If 1 is the best and 5 is the worst and each agent is setup the phone system will evaluate availability by skill level from 1-5 until it finds the best agent to handle the call and send them the call automatically
• Your BDC reps leave voice mails in the morning that call back after they have left for the day and you want them to be handled live.  The phone system can be customized so that calls can not go to a voice mail with out first going through a specific partner (buddy system) or a roll-over group.
   

These are 3 examples out of 100s of ways an ACD with advanced bdc phone metrics can drive efficiencies for your team.  Dealers are spending a large portion of their money on getting the phones to ring, yet very little on the phones themselves.  With an ACD let's learn how we can review performance on a whole new level with advanced bdc phone metrics:

Next up I will discuss go over how your reporting and feature needs should drive your next phone system purchase.  Here is that article

This is the 2nd article in the series Manage Your BDC like a Call Center:

As call volume increases you will find that your basic phone system is quickly becoming a major source of profit leakage.  How can you measure profit leakage in a BDC without a more modern phone system? Call the dealership yourself once a day asking the common questions your customer ask everyday.  You should also take a look at how many inbound calls came in versus being logged.  If you are using tracked local and toll free numbers on all of your customer facing marketing and communication you can make an effort to listen to these calls.  Keep in mind there is something wrong with nearly every call you will hear, so try not to over-react. Unfortunately it is going to be very hard as it will lack the tracking capability some very basic phone systems can.

So, is there a better way to handle calls then every phone in the department ringing at once until someone grabs a phone...yes and its called automatic call distribution or an ACD. 

Technology makes this inspection very easy. Your phone tracking and reporting infrastructure needs to be 100% custom to your business.  The metrics in this article are for phone systems with an ACD.  This type of phone system delivers calls to agents based on logic and availability.  So what is and ACD and what makes is so much better?  An ACD is software and hardware that is installed locally or hosted remotely designed to handle all of your incoming calls by distributing them in a more controlled streamline way.  The software allows for separate rules for different types of calls as well as situations.  Here are a few examples.

• You have 7 dealerships and you want all of the calls for your Honda dealership to be answered by your 4 Honda trained BDC reps (called skill based routing).  The calls for the Honda dealership are routed to a range of ACD groups designated for this store (basically a bank of local DIDs) that have rules built in to send the call to the agents that are Honda certified.  The system will automatically 'see' who is available of the 4 and send the call there.  If all of the 4 agents are unavailable we can setup a backup plan to roll the call to another team of agents (called a roll-over team).
• You have a BDC of 12 reps and you want more calls to route to the highest performers. Simple, ACDs have what is called priority based routing where you can set everyone on your team a level.  If 1 is the best and 5 is the worst and each agent is setup the phone system will evaluate availability by skill level from 1-5 until it finds the best agent to handle the call and send them the call automatically
• Your BDC reps leave voice mails in the morning that call back after they have left for the day and you want them to be handled live.  The phone system can be customized so that calls can not go to a voice mail with out first going through a specific partner (buddy system) or a roll-over group.
   

These are 3 examples out of 100s of ways an ACD with advanced bdc phone metrics can drive efficiencies for your team.  Dealers are spending a large portion of their money on getting the phones to ring, yet very little on the phones themselves.  With an ACD let's learn how we can review performance on a whole new level with advanced bdc phone metrics:

Next up I will discuss go over how your reporting and feature needs should drive your next phone system purchase.  Here is that article

This is the 1st article in the series Manage Your BDC like a Call Center:

Every department needs boundaries so the employees know their responsibilities.  This department I would argue has the ability to impact every inch of your business with a higher magnitude than any other.  With that great power comes the need for 100% transparency of its actions.  It is also fair to hold every other department to the same 100% transparency standard and dealers all across the country are already doing this.  Let’s be honest though this is a high dollar investment with high expectations, not to mention a few people in the organization may choose to keep their head buried in the sand to the need for improved customer communications and fight this change.  The response to that must be this, if customers are your most important asset than their experience with your organization should be giving top priority.

"The simple answer is when you decide to make it the communications hub of your organization."

You can measure this by tracking how customer make their way from person to person when they call.  You will find the long holds, multiple pages, repeat callers and poor communication skills.  Typically we blame the person who handles the last call, but if you had to wait 10 minutes to get an answer how pleasant would you be to set an appointment or come in for service.  Let’s de-personalize this and blame the process.  Phone training only goes so far, the most highly skilled person in the world will still be at a huge disadvantage if the customer is already frustrated.

Before you start purchasing technology and creating process you first need to understand the metrics and how you can build this communication hub with the end in mind.

*Items in blue require some additional segmentation and algorithms to develop

These metrics cover the preliminary phone KPIs you will need to manage your call center production.  (list does not include other areas of information including lead levels, conversions, call scores, CRM data etc.  You will need to add that information in to get the full picture of your teams performance)

In addition to the metrics you will also have to define the dimensions you will slice the data by. The dimensions would include:

• Time - (calls this hour, day, week, month)
• Assignment - (specific agents, extensions, teams, shifts, locations/stores)
• Source Information - (website, cars.com, retargetting, email campaign)

Next I will discuss how you take to to the next level from here by adding automatic call distribution with advanced call metrics.  Here is that article

This is the 1st article in the series Manage Your BDC like a Call Center:

Every department needs boundaries so the employees know their responsibilities.  This department I would argue has the ability to impact every inch of your business with a higher magnitude than any other.  With that great power comes the need for 100% transparency of its actions.  It is also fair to hold every other department to the same 100% transparency standard and dealers all across the country are already doing this.  Let’s be honest though this is a high dollar investment with high expectations, not to mention a few people in the organization may choose to keep their head buried in the sand to the need for improved customer communications and fight this change.  The response to that must be this, if customers are your most important asset than their experience with your organization should be giving top priority.

"The simple answer is when you decide to make it the communications hub of your organization."

You can measure this by tracking how customer make their way from person to person when they call.  You will find the long holds, multiple pages, repeat callers and poor communication skills.  Typically we blame the person who handles the last call, but if you had to wait 10 minutes to get an answer how pleasant would you be to set an appointment or come in for service.  Let’s de-personalize this and blame the process.  Phone training only goes so far, the most highly skilled person in the world will still be at a huge disadvantage if the customer is already frustrated.

Before you start purchasing technology and creating process you first need to understand the metrics and how you can build this communication hub with the end in mind.

*Items in blue require some additional segmentation and algorithms to develop

These metrics cover the preliminary phone KPIs you will need to manage your call center production.  (list does not include other areas of information including lead levels, conversions, call scores, CRM data etc.  You will need to add that information in to get the full picture of your teams performance)

In addition to the metrics you will also have to define the dimensions you will slice the data by. The dimensions would include:

• Time - (calls this hour, day, week, month)
• Assignment - (specific agents, extensions, teams, shifts, locations/stores)
• Source Information - (website, cars.com, retargetting, email campaign)

Next I will discuss how you take to to the next level from here by adding automatic call distribution with advanced call metrics.  Here is that article