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
want from your service BDC, it's time to do some math. Since your employees are mere mortals, doesn't it make sense to calculate what your capacity is per employee in a service BDC?
These simple equations begin with how many inbound appointment calls you are getting, the number of closed ROs each month, broken out by warranty and customer pay, plus the opportunities represented by the other processes you included in your vision and goals for your service BDC.
Now, staff accordingly, inte- grate your processes to your CRM tool and track every- thing. You are a smart person, and you'll be able to monitor effectiveness and adjust staffing and processes with the ebb and flow of your business and the changing
demands placed on your service BDC.
Don't give your service BDC too many hats to wear. These are specialists driving track- able revenue to your service lane. It's easy to see the ROI because you are measuring everything. Distracting them with miscellaneous tasks is not smart, and I don't see a need to go into specifics here because you know what I'm talking about!
Finally, growth works best when done in phases. The first thing we did in Kelley's case was sit down with the service management team and the principals and map out what we wanted from the service BDC. We then prioritized those wants by their ability to produce revenue.
Next, we did the math and determined we needed three
people just to handle the basics of inbound service calls, closed RO calls, service confirmation and missed appointment calls. The plan was to get these processes functioning at a healthy rate, then hire another service BDC specialist and add more processes like sold-no-service and six-month-no-service.
Kelley worked on integrating these processes to the CRM and mapping out written processes made familiar to all service personnel. She hired two reps and diverted first service appointment duties to the sales side of the BDC to start managing as part of the sold follow-up call. Things fell into place and the numbers went up instantly. By up, I mean they went from setting 52 service appointments a day to 85. The store now sees 95 percent completion of service follow-up and virtually no
hang-ups or voicemails.
As for the two new reps, the results outran the expense by a mile. Kelley now looks fresh and energetic and smiles a lot. Customers get through to her team easily and service advisors now spend more time with the customers in front of them, increasing the value of a repair order by 25 percent. First-service retention isn't evident yet because enough time hasn't passed, but so far scheduling of first service is up to 80 percent from zero.
All this was accomplished by structuring to succeed instead of structuring to fail.
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