Automotive BDC Archives - Page 2 of 2

How To Find The Right Dealership Service BDC

admin | Automotive BDC | automotive bdc, bdc, business development center, service bdc

As a service manager or general manager of a dealership, you are always looking to streamline various aspects of your business and increase ROI. One of the best ways to enhance your service department is to partner with an automotive service BDC to handle your customer service and various marketing efforts.

Choosing the right service BDC can be tricky, but we’re here to give you a few tips to get you started. In this article, we discuss what an automotive service BDC is, what to look for while searching for the right partner, and how Customer Traac can help you.

What is an Automotive Service BDC?

An automotive service BDC is a development center that specializes in optimizing the service departments of dealerships. BDCs schedule service appointments, send out satisfaction surveys, and focus on customer retention, all while handling high call volume and follow-ups. They remove certain tasks out of the hands of service departments so these departments have more time and energy to service their customers and provide a superior customer experience.

What to Look for in a Service BDC

When seeking a service BDC for your dealership, we recommend looking for a company that prioritizes the following values and services:

Customer Service Above All Else: Customer Service should be one of the top priorities of any service BDC, so we recommend choosing a partner that prioritizes providing an excellent customer experience above all else. The service BDC you choose should live and breathe customer service. It should also be able to prove its experience and skills in the field before signing on with you.

Rigorous Agent Training: One of the best ways to judge the level of customer service a BDC provides is by examining its agent training program. To ensure optimal levels of customer service, make sure the BDC trains its agents appropriately and that it prioritizes agent development and expertise.

Diversified Communication Abilities: A quality Service BDC should be able to communicate with customers via a variety of modes of communication. Examples of such modes of communication include phone, SMS, chat, email, and more.

Automotive Industry Experts: The automotive industry is unique in many ways, especially when it comes to servicing customers and running marketing campaigns. So, while seeking a service BDC for your dealership, we recommend choosing a company that focuses on the automotive industry, instead of a broad BDC covering numerous fields. This way, you can ensure you are hiring experts in your field who are experienced at dealing with your type of customers.

Excellent Client Communication: Communication is key for anything, especially something as important as your customer service. As a dealership, you probably prioritize your customer service above nearly everything else. So, you will want a service BDC that excels at communicating with you so you always know what’s going on. Moreover, the level of communication skills your BDC presents to you as its client will most likely reflect the level of communication skills it has with your customers.

Find the Right Service BDC with Customer Traac

If you are in need of an automotive service BDC for your dealership, or if you would like to speak with an expert in the field to learn more, please reach out to us to see how we can help. At Customer Traac, we work with you to understand your specific goals and needs, so we can provide a personalized service that optimizes your dealership’s marketing and communication efforts. We offer a full range of automotive marketing services, including a full-charge contact center, appointment scheduling, outbound calling campaigns, and a full-service automotive BDC. Our agents go through extensive training to make sure they provide the best customer service and help your business grow.

We partner with dealerships across the United States. Please call us at 763-553-2989 or fill out our contact form to learn more.

Outbound Campaigns: The Secret to Increasing Dealership Revenue

admin | Automotive BDC | automotive appointment scheduling, automotive bdc, automotive marketing, customer satisfaction

Continuing the conversation with existing customers is key to maintaining that relationship and customer retention.

Outbound campaigns can be highly effective for improving sales and service revenue in that it puts the power back in the hands of the dealership. Online and print advertisements promoting special offers leaves the decision making to the customer, who may not take the initiative to call the dealership to schedule. That’s why it’s so important for dealership business development centers to proactively engage with customers to drive business.

Start at the beginning

Leads that come in through your website are the best gift you can receive. These leads are customers who are actually interested in working with you and need to be captured or converted. Many salespeople may follow up on these leads via email or phone, but if they play phone tag or don’t get a response in a week or two, they end up forgotten. Chances are, customers who are reaching out via your website are early in their search for a vehicle, and they aren’t in a hurry to make a decision. But by being a resource for them during their car search can put you above the rest.

Pro Tip: If a customer leaves a voicemail or a phone number, call them back around the time they initially called you. That may be the time of day when they are free at work or are available to accept calls. If you don’t reach them the first time, try a call just outside of work hours between 4 and 5 pm, or around the lunch hour. Chances are, if someone reached out recently they are expecting the call and will be to hear from you! It can sometimes be forgotten how much people want a warm voice over the phone. It gives a personal touch in a world that is so much online and impersonal.

Those with vehicle equity

A good business development center will have a vehicle equity calculator that can effectively track timelines of vehicles purchased within their dealership, and pair that with ones that have left the lot. The amount of years owned, miles driven, and the make or model all determine a vehicle’s equity. Following up with these customers can sometimes lead to an upgraded purchase or a service appointment.

If the customer’s car is worth considering as a trade-in towards a new vehicle, you can help guide them through the process and get them into an upgraded vehicle faster. If that is not what they want, you can offer service incentives and, when the time comes, incentives for when they do want to purchase a new vehicle, to do it through your dealership.

Customers who bought but never came back

According to Snapcell, 76% of car buyers bought their next vehicle from the dealership that performed their regular maintenance. But only 13% of those car buyers had maintenance performed at the same dealership they bought the car from. Yikes! That’s why, after a customer buys a car, the sales team should follow up quickly to ensure satisfaction and answer any questions or concerns the customer may have after their purchase.

Setting a schedule to follow-up one, three, and six months after the vehicle purchase with customers can be some of the most effective outbound campaigns your dealership can run. Because we know there is one thing they will absolutely need with their new car—service maintenance. Reaching out to customers who bought a car through your dealership but haven’t utilized your service bay is an incredible opportunity. It’s possible these customers aren’t aware of the service incentives through the dealership and just need a helping hand to get there and get their car taken care of by the team who already knows them.

Customers who visited over six months ago

Run an inquiry of all your customers you saw six months ago or longer and begin an outbound campaign offering a percentage off service if they come in during the next six months. Chances are they either haven’t serviced their vehicle at all or they went to a different shop.

Pro Tip: Run these outbound campaigns right before winter, when people want to winterize their cars, and again before summer when people are planning road trips and vacations. These incentives can reignite a desire to come back to your dealership and they are great for customer retention!

Customer who recently received service

Customers who were just in for service should also get a follow-up call within seven days. Be sure to ask if they were satisfied with the service and how their car is running overall. This can be a good opportunity to schedule their next service appointment, like oil changes and tire rotations. This also presents an opportunity to catalog the mileage of their vehicle and discuss their plans for when it comes time to trade-in. Pro Tip: Create incentives based on future resale value if customers continue to get service through your dealership.

Outbound campaigns for potential and existing customers are one of the most important tools at your disposal in increasing sales and improving customer satisfaction. Customers want to feel important and cared for, and maintaining that relationship throughout the weeks, months, and years after they’ve worked with you can significantly improve your sales and service revenue as well as your dealership’s reputation.

Outsourced business development centers like Customer Traac can help ensure your customers never go without a follow-up call, email, or a pre-scheduled service. On top of service appointments and sales equity mining, our team can work with your dealership to create custom outbound campaigns based on current or future sales trends, and continual efforts to retain customers. It’s what we’ve been doing for over 30 years!

Contact a member of the Customer Traac team to how we can help your dealership reach profit goals today.

How an Automotive Business Development Center Can Help Support Your Sales Team

admin | Automotive BDC, Customer Service | automotive appointment scheduling, automotive bdc, customer service, dealership customer service, service bdc

The sales team at a car dealership is comprised of multiple positions with multiple responsibilities throughout the company. Some positions you may find at a dealership that play a role in the sales process include sales associates, sales managers, and the general manager. And while these positions are primarily focused on driving dealership success, they are still responsible for elements of the customer service strategy. This might include answering the phone when they aren’t with an active customer, greeting customers on the lot, or even grabbing a bottle of water for a service customer waiting for their vehicle. And while all of these tasks certainly keep team members busy throughout the day, not all of them are actively generating revenue for the dealership. That’s why moving customer service activities away from the sales team is a great way to create more bandwidth for those employees to tend to the sales process and develop a truly seamless transition between the sales and customer service teams. Let’s dig into a few of the ways in which an automotive business development center can help support your sales team.

What is a Business Development Center?

In the automotive industry, Business Development Centers (or BDCs) work alongside sales and service teams to manage incoming calls, schedule sales and service appointments, and perform outbound campaigns that generate sales and service leads. Additionally, BDCs can help improve customer retention, conduct satisfaction surveys, and handle general or overflow call volume. By removing these tasks from other teams, sales and service staff can focus on what they do best and dealers can rest assured that no ball is being dropped in the process.

Answering Calls and Managing High Call Volume

An automotive business development center can help alleviate heavy call volume by answering calls that otherwise could pull salespeople and sales managers away from customers. BDCs, like Customer Traac, become masters on the subject of your dealership so they can answer questions, resolve inquiries, and even relay specific details regarding car service needs and timelines. This removes a lot of the time spent by sales teams on customer service issues that can pull focus away from the selling of cars, which in-turn opens up availability to make more sales and keep moving inventory.

When your dealership sales or service teams are getting a high volume of calls for questions on top of inquiries, it can get messy. Additionally, consider the times of year when you typically experience an increase in people purchasing cars as well as servicing them. These increased call volumes can be a lot to handle, and outsourcing them to a team that is equipped to manage these seasonal shifts can aid your dealership in its busy season. A BDC can take those calls and turn them into schedules for the sales and service teams that keeps everyone busy but not overloaded.

Follow-up Calls

Following up with customers about their purchase, their vehicle’s maintenance schedule, returning calls with issues, and other customer service tasks can be left for the BDC to handle in a timely, and efficient manner. This way, salespeople won’t have to worry about keeping track of customer voicemails, emails, or disrupting sales efforts to make these follow-up calls. Additionally, follow-up calls can bring a lot of recurring business to the dealership. It’s a tactic that can easily fall by the wayside if salespeople aren’t getting responses or calls back after a week or two. A BDC that remains diligent in reaching out to existing or potential customers have a very high chance of turning calls into appointments, future trade-ins, or even a good review.

Scheduling Service Appointments

BDCs will know a car’s suggested service maintenance schedule based on the make, model, year, and when the customer purchased the vehicle. This means they can make and maintain a full schedule of service appointments that improves customer retention and creates a full schedule for the service team.

An automotive business development center can help create a ripple effect from the initial sale, and takes care of all the supporting activities associated with it. Customer Traac starts at once after a sale and can start outbound campaigns, pre-schedule service appointments, and alleviate call volume from the dealership.

For over 30 years, Customer Traac has provided outsourced business development center solutions for dealerships across the country. We know that when your teams have more time to focus on what they do best, your dealership grows. Reach out today to learn how we can help your sales team sell more cars and create lasting customer relationships.