Auto Dealer Monthly Magazine is the daily operations publication serving the retail automotive industry. This automotive publication serves dealer principals, officers and general managers with the latest best practices.
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industry expert / business development
Structure Your Service BDC to Succeed
Greg Wells has spent almost 25 years working in automo- tive retail, with specific expertise in business development centers and Internet sales. His work has been recognized nationally by NADA, and his in-dealership sales training experience has launched many successful selling careers for his students. Greg is a senior partner at Kain Automotive Inc. He can be reached at 859.983.0370.
GWells@AutoDealerMonthly.com I
n January, while visiting a new client for the first time, I was introduced to the
dealership's service BDC. Her name was Kelley. "Kelley," I was told, "is our Service BDC rep." She answers all service calls, schedules appointments, confirms service appoint- ments, does service follow-up and calls customers when their parts come in, along with a variety of other things to help keep the service lane moving. She's also the war- ranty clerk, back-up cashier, and on Saturdays acts as the company's switchboard opera- tor. I thought she must be the bionic woman!
When talking to Kelley I discovered she wasn't the bionic woman. Instead, she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. I asked, "So tell me how it's going?" She shared with me that she had 400 open to-do items on her CRM dashboard, eight fresh service Internet leads to respond to and twenty-some- thing voicemails. On top of that, she was behind on her warranty work and hadn't made a follow-up call in weeks. I let her vent for about
an hour and then we got down to the business of fixing things. I've never met a frontline employee so happy to see me. Unfortunately, this is not an uncommon occurrence for me. As I told Kelley, "I've seen this movie," and I'll tell you, it is a tragedy.
I understand that dealers need to be lean and mean these days, especially when it comes to personnel. I'm a disciple of "throw a process at it instead of people," but sometimes things are just structured to fail. In the wake are really good people getting bulldozed by the workload.
When building a BDC (sales, service or both), structure is the foundation of success. You can put ordinary people in a great structure and see extraordinary results. Conversely, you can put extraordinary people, like Kelley, in a poor structure and see dismal results.
So what's the structure formula? Here are a few tips to help you structure your service BDC for success.
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It begins with a clearly-defined vision of what you want your service BDC to do. In Kelley's case this was nonexistent. It kind of started out with closed RO calls and snowballed into her state of pending death by task completion.
Is your goal to relieve service advisors of phone pressure? It's a worthy goal for sure, not only for the service advisor's ability to stay engaged with customers in the service lane, but your customers benefit too. In our experience, diverting inbound service calls to a service BDC increases appointment setting from around 40 percent to 70 per- cent. The process also reduces hang-ups and customers sent to voicemail by 30 percent.
Maybe you also want to make sure your service customers are satisfied with the work you performed. Your service BDC can improve SSI and survey response significantly and discover defects in your processes or recognize trends particular to a certain techni- cian or job.
Outbound processes such as sold-no-service, first service appointment, missed appoint- ments, six-months-no-service, declined service and so on drive service traffic, and the ROI will certainly be there.
The point is you have to begin with the end in mind or you create a train that is sure to come off the tracks. Once you have established what you
