“Sales call pick up line 1.”
We have all heard this or something similar announced over the PA system at a dealership. It typically occurs when a prospective customer calls a dealership and inquires about a vehicle or asks for the sales department. The process is to place the call in a queue and allow the salespeople to pick up the call–with the most ambitious salesperson rewarded with a sales call and the opportunity usually associated with a call.
Much of my time working with dealerships focused on how to maximize inbound opportunities. While the internet age placed digital answers at the fingertips of prospects, customers continued to call and at the same rate they always did. So, the question is: why are they calling?
The answer is that they are now using the telephone and their caller experience as a reason to choose (or not choose) a dealership to do business with. Simply put, the quality of their phone interaction with a salesperson heavily influences their choice of dealership! This is compelling when you consider that nearly forty percent of sales calls result in a vehicle sale within one week. Where that sale occurs is in the hands of the salesperson that takes the call and how they handle it.
This is where the system needs some help.
If these callers are some of the best opportunities, why would you not pay closer attention to what happens on each call?
Highlight Opportunities in Customer Interactions
Knowledge is power. Conversational intelligence software can reveal opportunities to make the most of each engagement, identifying prospects that are actively trying to decide where they will purchase and what they will purchase. It is now possible to programmatically assess whether a call went well, the customer’s overall impression of the business that was called, and whether the engagement resulted in an appointment or sale.
With competition ramping up, it just makes sense to measure these experiences and adjust as necessary with coaching. The introduction of call scoring and sentiment analysis means dealerships can adjust their practices and improve their results.
Encourage Better Employee Performance
Distributing calls via round-robin will not always yield the best results. The ability to pick up a call quickly does not necessarily mean that the person that took the call is the best one to handle the engagement. With opportunities being harder and harder to find, it makes sense to make sure you have your best players on the field. Using conversation intelligence allows you to measure and rank salespeople based on the level of satisfaction someone has from calling your dealership. We’ve seen that this measurement tends to strongly correlate with the number of appointments set. Using this information can help any business enhance effectiveness and improve the satisfaction of their customers
Reveal Key Information
Marchex has the ability to provide comprehensive insights into customer interactions with a focus on everything from the customer’s emotion to the overall perception and satisfaction with the business. It is now possible to identify the specific likely reasons why a caller had an unpleasant experience. This information was historically hard to define and report on after the opportunity had passed. Reasons for poor call experiences can vary from uninformed salespeople, to a lack of accountability or even an abnormally long time on hold.
The idea is to empower management to understand EXACTLY what happens when a sales call arrives at a dealership, or even when a salesperson makes an outbound call. This knowledge is not meant to “beat up” the people taking the calls, but to increase the dealership’s overall results. Contrary to widely held belief, few people are naturally “good on the phone.” They either had a good coach along the way or burned through many opportunities to practice. Offering coaching makes the most sense as no business can afford to lose opportunities while an agent practices.
Elevate The Customer Experience
The ability to measure customer experience in automotive sales and service has always been limited to surveying customers or mystery shopping at a dealership to see what the actual experience will be. These methods work However, they may not offer the timeliest measurement, and they offer a limited sample size. Surveys are typically completed only by those customers who are extremely happy or utterly unhappy with the business, and mystery shops are usually limited to a few monthly calls. Additional measurement and deeper analysis can add significant context to each coaching opportunity and elevate sales and service performance.
Reach Out Today
If you would like to gain this level of insight, have a conversation with us about sentiment analysis today. It is time to elevate the overall performance with your most valuable opportunities, starting with understanding what is happening with your calls and why it happened.
