welcome back to the fixed Ops Roundtable Scott Davis the president of Volie is with us today Volie is automotives
number one BDC software Scott is a great friend to the industry and has been
blowing it up here on the Roundtable the last several events uh a big study to be announced today Scott welcome back to
the fix stops Round Table hey Ted great to be back uh thanks for having me I
really enjoyed when you delivered the study uh I believe it was the middle of last year and you survey you have
millions of calls in this study and it's eye openening and uh it got a lot of
attention Scott so I'm so happy you're here today to update it take us through it and um with that I'm gonna go ahead
and uh turn the show over to you we all know what's been going on with interest rates everything in in in the automotive
Market the way to build predictable profits is through your service BDC I'm
going to talk about that today so we are
well okay Ted I don't know what I did but but you're going to cut that out
right yeah we are yeah you should be able to advance the slides without that there we go all
right so I'm going to talk to you today about uh your service BDC and how you
can put a little strategy you know these are the predictable profits in your dealership and and we're going to talk
about this so Volie is automotives number one BDC software like Ted said we
work with dealers across North America 620 right now and it's a tool that that
it's an all-in-one solution where dealers bdcs they take inbound calls and Volie when they're not on an inbound
call then we serve up the next most important outbound call and you know it's a way to make your your agents turn
one agent into five we help them be really productive it's a multi-channel unit Pro uh platform form call email and
SMS a lot of the email and SMS that's happening uh happens behind the scenes
for the agent so we focus on calls we talk about being 85% efficient with the
calls and uh so I have a call study today with about that we that we looked
at 25 million calls so volle's based Fort Meyers Florida yeah and uh just
great to be here today I like that by the way turn one agent into into five
agents that's so strong yeah well um dealerships everything's been getting more complexed uh in a dealership
they're they have less resources well they've got to do more and um BDC
technology really hasn't changed they have to do more I was actually just speaking with one of our customers out
of Miami last night and he was talking about how how the heck does he ever get it done the general manager for a large
group so um BDC is no different we all feel it really but um
people are keeping their cars longer than anytime since 2008 2009 we know the
reasons why right inflation High interest rates a tough economy those are
just a few and uh so that means with with uh new car
sales bottoming out in 2022 uh loyalty's never even more important right uh because you know you
get more built-in uh service business with new car sales because of warranties
OEM incentives Etc right Ted oh no question about it Scott no no
doubt about it and you hit the nail on the head with all the reasons you know uh where we are in this current economy
yeah the the problem with that is that your service department is is the source of a lot of sales so that's why we put
this together whether you use Volie or not you know hopefully you can get some good information out of this um really
the keys to doing this first of all uh if it were my BDC um understand the
science behind um you know how you can be successful The Big Numbers you need to know and then put a strategy together
so you can reach out to people proactively I'm going to show you guys why that's important um your customers
don't think of you as much as you think of them and then uh put a system in place train your people uh leave you
know train them on everything from scripts for service retention to voicemails Etc and so you're you let
your customers know you that U that they're valuable to you and not just transactions so that's kind of the
strategy at a high level and we'll dig into the some of the stats Scott I've
always said that the fortune is in the followup and this really helps the dealership at the dealership level do
there just that okay so like I said we did base this on 25 million phone calls uh last
year we did it on 10 we we've we've had a good year and and you know had some interesting learnings with throwing a
much a lot more data behind this so I think you guys will like it so first of all inbound now one thing I want to I
want to just remind everyone about service service is a guaranteed
transaction every single person who buys a car needs service they just don't necessarily need it from you guys so how
do you make sure that you keep your promises to the people who are trying to do business with you how do you make
sure that you you have hit the people when they're due for service before they
think of someone else on the day right um because everyone needs service they they just don't necessarily need to get
it from us so first of all inbound we talked about this last year I just wanted to highlight once again um most
of your calls are coming between two and five this graph is a little bit off uh
because um the the volume between 8 and N is about half of what it is from 9 to
one so it m it makes the uh the numbers look a little different your Staffing
strategy needs to be locked and loaded and ready at nine just keep in mind uh
if your BDC agents or or anyone says all my customers don't call at this time or we're not busy at this time it's pretty
pretty uh normal pretty static from from n from 9 to five busy hour over over all
of these inbound calls and of the 25 million it was 11 million inbound call calls was 10 to 11 this year so though
they were all very close within a couple points 9 to 10 10 to 11 11 to 12
Etc once again we looked at this Mondays are different so um uh your Staffing
strategy starts and it ends with Monday all your part-timers uh if you have them
start them on Mondays um no days off on Mondays Etc I broke it out a little bit
different than last year but 25% uh more uh inbound calls came on
Monday than Tuesday 41% came on more on Monday than Friday so just keep that in
mind those are big numbers um it for for you folks who don't have a Saturday BDC
the people who had a Saturday BDC 8% of their call volume came in on Saturday
and most of our customers are only open a half day on that right so just know that if you don't have a a s a Saturday
BDC and you're forwarding calls to the cashier or whatever you're probably missing some
opportunities I would say look at that and you know that kind of explains why Monday feels the way it does at the
dealership it's still dominating y yeah um so how do you look a drop rate um 59%
of people who drop call back in that seems pretty good right last year I had the stat and it was only 37% and with
that 37% we took a very tight window and so this year I wanted to look at this a little bit different the 59% was
basically forever so you do drop some people you don't lose all of them forever um last year stat was very
alarming to people um and and once again the average hold time or the average
drop by hold time 69% of the people dropped in less than 30 seconds just think of that um and of the
people who dropped 58% never serviced the dealership again and we went back we went back uh quite a
ways to to get this stat and so that we could look forward um very important to
stay on top of your drop rate average hold time for answers calls 46 seconds
average hold time for agent drops 72 seconds people who do wait wait for a long time in general but um just just
know that first and foremost our goal is to make the people happy who are trying to do business with
us interesting very good here's one of the alarming stats that we looked at uh
because you know we we have new customers start and they're like geeez I think our inbound uh inbound call
volume's gone down and we dig into it with them and uh and their volume hasn't
gone down just the number of people who drop call back in a lot less onethird of
the people who call back in from drop calls call back many times uh more three times so just think
of how many exra resources your BDC is using if you're doing a bad job answering the phones feels like the
phone's ringing all day right so that's that's very inefficient yeah wow yeah
and and think of how frustrated people are are with that as well so yeah so if
you call them back good news and uh 58% of them will answer 59% of those who
answer schedule an appointment those are conversion rates off the charts these people are buyers 63% had a previous
service in their DM DMS one of the most alarming stats is
41% of all the drops are not your fault um so we classify them in two different
ways we have customer drops and we have agent drops the customer drops are the people that hang up as soon as it hits
the ivr and we all know customers hate ivrs right I mean there's a lot of products that are are coming out
nowadays that try to combine B that customers hate ivrs well um 41% weren't
your fault what does that tell you you guys need to have a strategy in place where people get called back who who
have drop calls every time it's costing you tons of business wow
wow okay so this is something we looked at we started seeing a lot of our
customers tracking uh status checks by service advisor and uh and so we started
to dig into this and uh and this is this these stats are alarming
24.5 uh% of the calls were status checks involed so of that uh 63% were
answered um and when we say answer that means the agent uh successfully
connected with the service advisor uh 37% they never did um it's funny by the
way I was at at I was at a show recently and a few weeks ago and one of the other
vendors that were there that does some call monitoring talked about how um customers connect with with the service
department and um only 63% of the customers got connected with the service
department so it was the exact same number they don't connect with the BDC they don't connect with their customers
so um the alarming stat is 34% of those unsuccessful transfers didn't service
again that is eye opening yeah now I mean there's many reasons why
people don't uh don't transact again with you you know some of them could have moved uh or or traded their car or
got in a wreck you know God forbid but you know we're we're working on the margins at $285 an r or whatever you're
working on you need to know these numbers and if you can improve them even slightly it really moves the needle
right knowledge is power so um we had hundreds of thousands of status checks
in here obviously the average duration of a status check was 3 minutes and 59 seconds wow four minutes so think of
that 24.5 six% calls were status checks
three minutes and 59 cents three minutes and 59 seconds for status checks um and
the people who called called in for a status check called in more than once one and a half time average customer so
think of the aggravation you're calling or you're you're causing your customers who have to call in for status checks um
put a system in place where your service advisors you know eliminate that call on the front end it's costing your it's a
big hidden cost to your BDC um it is a um a source of great aggravation for
your customers it was shocking to us really um we we hadn't benchmarked it
before we will this next year I we' got some good guesses um I actually what happened is we had a customer a new
customer and after the first 90 days we looked in 37% of their calls were status checks and we started to dig into this a
lot lot more it was very alarming W geez lot of time spent there a whole lot
and I I know you were transferring Translating that into money but uh it needs to be said yeah yeah and you know
how do we even Quant quantify how aggravated people are um constantly
checking because they they're checking because they feel like a promise was broken U with their service advisor so
when you're not at an inbound call it's very important to uh to proactively reach out to your customer for outbound
calls so um once again um the answer rates the by the way the orientation of
this top slide I need to fix this because you can see in real life it's only a few points difference it looks
like it's double but it's just how we laid it out um the answer rates are best
in the morning um but they're only a few points better uh the appointment rates
were actually best in the afternoon as as a percentage but once again they were
only a few points difference it doesn't matter don't let anyone tell you that
our customers won't make appointments at this time or our customers won't answer it this time um the real key is to keep
your agents on the phone and have them be 85% efficient 85% efficient means
they're on the phones about 50 minutes an hour so you guys can track that many different ways uh that is the real key
these numbers don't matter and I just wanted to put them out so that that we don't pigeon hole ourselves into certain
schedulers because we know our customers don't do this it the data doesn't doesn't bear it
out this number is skewed heavily in Volie because we have hundreds of that
do state inspections those are very short calls I I didn't want to change it these are actual numbers um but the
average call duration for an outbound appointment was two minutes and 16 seconds if you take out those state
inspection calls it was almost almost uh it was still under three minutes but it
was a little bit higher the average appointment time on an inbound call was
3 minutes and 52 seconds which oddly enough is about the same as as a status check um yeah but um so think about why
an outbound call is so much shorter than an inbound call for the amount of time spent on the on the
phone well I mean the agent is you are being proactive with your customers you're contacting before they have
issues you can catch those in the inspection and such your service advisors can sell uh when they're
calling they have got problems quite often you've got to put them on hold you know check for parts get questions
answered Etc when you're doing outbound campaigns you have control of the conversation and and uh um people need
to really uh put that as part of their strategy doing outbound you'll have
happier customers so makes a lot of sense um answer rates
by attempt so we put a little different stat here this this year I took all of the attempts across and it was 13.7
million that I that I put it in but the answer rates by the first attempt were
quite a bit better than than the further ones um I'm going to show you why you should make all of them you should make
the first attempt for every reason you ever um if you're short staff prioritize
that um last year if you remember our presentation Ted we took just the people
who are should be doing coming in any day and those on a four attempt campaign the numbers were about 35% Blended rates
over all four attempts they were very high in the first time but I wanted to put these all out here because I I've
got a point to make on this um you should make the first attempt uh you should if you've got the Staffing make
multiple attempts um one of the alarming stats this was in last year's and this
was almost the exact same stat so the percentage people who the agents marked
in Volie as not interested who actually came in and we looked at this this they
came in in the next 120 days uh 26.8 6% of the um it was somewhere around u a
half a million people who an agent said not interested who came back in um now
the cynical person is going to say oh those agents are calling hanging up and
marking some of is not interest um we don't see a lot of evidence of that uh
you and I both know Ted agents have hard jobs they're working really hard and a
lot of these people keep in mind what we spoke about earlier everyone needs service right but maybe when I got
called for service I was out of town in you know Minneapolis like I was a few days ago uh and so that answer is a no I
just can't even think about it um everyone is never a no for service
they're one of two things if if they're not going to schedule the appointment with you they're one of two things they're not right now or I'm not going
to get service uh with you so they're never a no so what you need to do keep
in mind it's very important to uh to be very friendly it's very important not to
take it personally you know we have no idea what someone's day is coming an extremely large amount of this database
came back in uh um after telling the agent they weren't
interested amazing well followup followup followup
um we did do the math on this so uh if if you have someone just wailing away at
attempts two through five it's about two attempts per hour so there is a true
cost of not making more than one attempt you have to have to have to make
the first attempt for every customer that you want to connect with
um uh if you have the Staffing you have to prioritize going back to the ones that didn't
answer makes sense okay what if you connect so last year if
you remember Ted um we took a control group of people that weren't in campaigns and we compared them to people
who uh who were in were in campaigns and you connected with them um it was the
what if you do nothing slide and the lift was uh on your database was about
52% of you know if you don't do anything with your database or you're proactively reach out to them this time this year we
did the did the study a little bit different we took all these people in Volie who were enrolled in um a service
retention campaign so basically all of them theoretically made uh made the
campaign for the same criteria and we looked at the we compared the people who were spoken to compared to the people
who the dealer uh did not speak to and didn't leave a voicemail and the conversion rate was about five times
geez so um uh you um the customers are service transactions they're just not
always ready when when you are so we want to get them uh we spoke about this at length last year potential spam so um
uh estimated that 32% of all calls are labeled potential spam um you can find
Services out there I mean there are there are multiple ones just a few numbers that that you might care about
um and I'll talk about what I would do if it was my dealership if I wasn't signing up for one of these services
that that Do It um we took millions of calls before uh we bundled this into
Volie um we we did it post that the lift was answer rate lift was about
38% if you don't have this part of your strategy with your BDC you're you're doing probably a lot of wasted wasted
effort ask yourself this Ted when is the last time you picked up the phone and answered when it said potential
spam uh never yeah never not too often Scott when we looked
at this um we've got very good logging for Verizon 7 to 10% of the numbers are
always marked as spam in Verizon so um we just looked at a dealership and they
they submitted 145 numbers all the Volie numbers plus their desk phones their Clic to call and everything 48% of
them were labeled potential spam um some of the dispersion of this was really interesting some of them were labeled as
spam who had one attempt in the last six months other ones I mean most of them
were were their heavy use lines um we sit on you know I don't know if it's 150,000 numbers it's it's a big number
6.12% of those numbers need to be remediated meaning um someone complained
that they were spam the carriers marked it a Spam we had to go back to the carriers and remove that label um wow uh
the average remediation was two times so these folks are are uh are
maybe uh working pretty hard to get these numbers um labeled as potential spam but
so almost an average of two times those 6.12 numbers so what do you guys do about it first and foremost um and this
is this is the manual grunt work if you haven't heard this um take a cell phone
from all three carrier major carriers and test your numbers test them in the
morning afternoon and night it seems like a lot of work but I would at least do that to see got problem um and then
there's many things you can do you can uh um you can uh you know register with
a free Call Registry you have to do it a lot there's services that can do it um but at the very least you should be
aware of what it is swapping out numbers is not an effective strategy because uh
they're not making any new phone numbers when they throw a number back in the pool they're grabbing one quite often
that has a bad reputation so just keep that mind you need to look it's probably costing you a lot of service
business and this potential spam for dealers you know we didn't talk about that a few years ago but we didn't have
the number of calls that are labeled spam today Scott and this is a big potential issue that dealers need to be
aware of yeah and and really it it's it's not the dealers fault and the
dealers don't make unwanted calls right most of our traffic I would bet 97% of
it is you have service due you have a recall um checking on your service
appointment confirmation and you submitted a lead and I'm following up on it all of those none of those make the
definition of an unwanted call um what happened was there was there was legislation that was passed a few years
ago then there was a a a famous Facebook case that kind of lacks the rules for
robo dialing uh the government went to the carriers and say okay um now that
it's easier to Robo dial it's up to you guys to solve this problem and the carriers are aggressively trying to
solve it it's going to get worse okay good to be aware um a little
more numbers uh one of the ones we had a customer doing this and uh I was pretty
surprised uh we took all of our customers who do sales BDC and service BDC and we took their leads plus or
minus 10 days and saw if someone enrolled in a service campaign had had an act acve sales lead so um for the
life of me I mean we can do that programmatically we put it on our list but if you have a strategy where you can
look 3% of the people uh who we looked at had an active sales lead uh who were
who were due for service pretty interesting I would say um should you
leave a voicemail you should absolutely leave a voicemail um for sure 100% on
the first time uh when we looked at this I I I can't believe this number is right
um but we double- checked it many times and we also looked at outbound conversions and 40% of the outbound
conversions were from people calling back in from an outbound campaign um
26.7% of the people call back if you leave a voicemail 64% better conversion if you never reach
them but you leave a voicemail compared to if you if you don't you're nuts if you don't leave one
you're nuts if you don't uh train to it and uh and and practice it and roleplay
it leave friendly voicemails don't don't mail them in um one of the uh strategies
that you need to do um we need to catch people before they're ready for service we looked across all brands I have the
breakdown but I just included all of them for the slide 229 days between services for the average uh customer um
Vol sitting on 244 million customers uh matched four Mill four billion records
for those 244 million customers the average service time between service was 229 days so if it was my business um I
would I would look at my duration uh you know my average duration and I would
walk that back six weeks and start reaching out to those people be proactive with them um many of you are
booked out three weeks depending on what this what the customer would do if it's more than a quick lube so aren't you
much better off being proactive there um you got to catch these people before they think of it's somewhere else the
outbound math once again it hasn't changed it's a game of effort 100 extra service attempts should be uh an extra
seven to nine appointments and depending on how you do the math um that would be an extra three and a half to four people
who weren't going to come in the numbers are clear over millions of calls when I say faster or not at all keep in mind so
you're if every outbound appointment you schedule they either weren't coming in
um or you got them to come in faster the odds of you the OD it has to
be a very small percentage of people who uh who you called them on the day they
were gonna call you and come in right Ian seem logical sure um this is very
tough math I don't even know how to guess it on this call but just think if everyone uh if if you SK if you can go
to schedule a th000 outbound appointments a month now and every one of those came in three weeks early uh
speeding up the velocity that database maybe that turns your average number of transactions per customer maybe if it
goes from two times a year to 2.15 times a year you do the math you got an extra
month of service so keep in mind every outbound service you schedule you got them to come in faster or they weren't
going to come in at all so make those extra outbound attemp make it part of your your strategy Benchmark it
separately than than your inbound calls so these are pretty similar to
last year um you want the agents on the phone 85% of the time uh by the way I
don't believe an agent needs to be on the phone 60 minutes an hour they have hard jobs they get yelled at nearly
every day um whether it's internally or by the customers Etc um but if they're
on the phone 50 minutes an hour um keep your drop rate below 6% that's a good
Benchmark um and call back 100% of the people who did drop there's a lot of buyers there um if we know one thing
more than nearly anything and if I have one tip because I we we rarely see dealers before this Benchmark outbound
attempts separately from inbound calls know those numbers know them
religiously if you don't you'll lose tranulis outbound calls and you'll have weeks go buy if you don't Benchmark
those separately where you had no outbound strategy we see it all the time you know in dealers we we just add they
they they'll admit up to that status checks um I don't know what the good Benchmark is I've got some guesses
looking at some of our better stores next year on this presentation Ted I'm G to have some incredible numbers for you
here um internally you should start checking we had a new customer um that I
I went recently and their status check percentage was about about 9%
fabulous relative to the average um I also you know we we've seen people with status check percentages of
37% um measure your conversions for the number of people you speak to all always
effective um I included some best in- class numbers here Ted these are kind of interesting some of them are BC numbers
some of them are individual numbers um and and a couple I actually even though
I wanted to make this about calls again uh because like I said there are a lot of um lot of ways to send an email and
SMS your agents can do those automatically will still be in on the phone but uh um the first these are all
BDC stats uh and over a month we have a BDC averaging 33 productive calls per
hour six appointments per hour um as a whole BDC and averaging 240 inbound
outbound combined attempts a day per agent so they schedule almost 1,00
outbound appointments a week this BDC um there's an agent at one BDC and this is
a state inspection email I don't know I don't know I suspect this is that but this person in a week scheduled 85
appointments on 182 uh uh conversations so I suspect they were
state inspections because I know what store it was for but uh uh very good you should measure that um we have an agent
and averaging 47 appointments a day um she's just a machine for this one dealer
group um we've got a large dealer group their drop rate is
4.88% um here's a here's an interesting stat right here so are you guys keeping
track of the amount of of uh inbound lead calls B basically subtract all the
transfers all the status checks the calls where people call to schedule an appointment how successful are you um
our best one their conversion is 93.6% on inbound calls so that's an
interesting stat I didn't talk about it earlier uh it's a really good way to
find out how good PE how good your people are on the phone how well trained they are um I I'd look at that if I were
you yeah um these next two are SMS I included him because I was blown away by
him actually um so we've got an A agent who who over a month is managing 47 SMS
conversations an hour they have a very aggressive an hour yeah so they they
have it's an extremely large store uh it's a two-store group one of the stores
does something like 10,000 Ros a month um but uh yes I mean they they deploy
these campaigns um she's seamlessly working between this we have another agent same BDC she's averaging eight
appointments per hour so those blew me away I just had to include them for the fun of it so sure I
hope you guys have enjoyed these Stats today so um and uh well I got an extra
dot there but um the best BDC we have is averaging 2.7 outbound attempts to
inbound calls they receiving so just keep that in mind Benchmark it
separately uh you'll be happy you did once again to talk about the key
learnings um Blended is better um have a strategy where when they're when they're
not doing inbound calls they're aggressively making outbound calls but first focus on the people trying to do
business with you I um it it it amazes me we break promises with our customers
all day um there's a lot of business to be had just by meeting their expectations I've got an incredible call
Ted I'll play it for you on on the the next time we're on live where someone is calling back to thank a dealer for uh
for calling them back they were blown away um effort matters remember a 100
outbound attempts should be seven to nine service appointments um make those extra 100 attempts in a day in a in a
week Etc uh being cheerful once again
uh every person buys service they don't necessarily buy it from you and every
know is actually not right now because of that so uh be cheerful and uh and
even when you get no OB we know Mondays no Mondays off for anyone and uh and you
need to be proactively without bound you need to make more than one account one attempt um our customers don't think of
us as much as we think of them finally uh and the new stat and I have some really good benchmarking on this next
year um avoid the hidden cost of status checks start tracking your status checks
by service advisors work with your service managers eliminate those and you've got a lot of extra time to build
your service business so there you are Ted Scott great
information powerful power I've been T sitting here taking notes um I want to watch it again
and again there was so much in here you crammed EV what an amazing study 25
million Scott Davis um thank you on behalf of the fix Toops Round Table um
if people want to reach out for more information on Vol uh is the best way yeah just just email me I mean they can
go on the website and and put a lead they can email me email me if you want a copy of the deck I'll send it to you I'm
I'm good with sending it out so love to talk to whe whether or not
you're signing up for Volie I have a lot of uh appreciation for how hard bdcs are working so I'd love to help them and
how important the phones are in this day and age Scott Davis on behalf of the fix stops round table thank you for all you
do at Volie to move our industry forward and very grateful to have you with us thank you uh have a good day Ted
thanks for having me on again everybody Scott Davis we'll have him back again and again the president of Volie.com
here today at the fix stops Round Table see you