automotive contact center chart

Contact Center Analytics: What Dealerships Need to Know

admin | Automotive BDC, Contact Center | , , , , ,

Measuring the success of your automotive contact center can be tricky, but in this article, we’ll discuss the metrics you should use to appropriately measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and customer interactions. Specifically, we will go through the main functions of a contact center and recommend metrics to use to measure success for each. Then we will discuss how outsourcing your contact center to a third-party BDC can save time and money for your dealership.

Appointment Scheduling

When measuring the success of your appointment scheduling services, you obviously want to look at the total number of appointments scheduled and see how that changes month to month. In addition to that, however, you should look at the following metrics as well:

  • Appointments scheduled per agent
  • Cost per appointment scheduled
  • Percentage of service calendar that is filled each week or month

Outbound Call Campaigns

While evaluating the success of your outbound call campaigns, try to focus on the following metrics:

  • Conversion rate (“Conversion” could mean a sale, appointment scheduled, or anything else you are trying to accomplish with your campaign.)
  • Cost per conversion
  • Customer follow-up rate

Customer Interaction

Measuring the success of your customer interactions can be tricky because a lot of what determines success in this case is qualitative, such as customer satisfaction. For this, we recommend focusing on the following:

  • Customer satisfaction with level of service (can be obtained through surveys)
  • Customer follow-up rate (a high follow-up rate could indicate customer satisfaction)
  • Percentage of emails or phone calls returned by customers

General Customer Service

Similar to customer interactions, measuring the effectiveness of your general customer service can be challenging. We recommend using the following metrics:

  • Customer satisfaction with level of service (can be obtained through surveys)
  • Customer retention rate (this can be a good indicator of your overall customer service, seeing as customers who believe they are treated well are more likely to return for more business).

Enhance Your Dealership with Customer Traac’s Contact Center

Outsourcing your contact center to a third party has many benefits. Briefly, though, outsourcing your contact center will lead to more service appointments scheduled, a better customer experience, more enhanced marketing and sales campaigns, and the saving of time and money. Partnering with a third party BDC will also ensure you work with a company that knows how to measure success and analyze data to give you a clear picture of your dealership’s contact center operations.

If you would like to improve your dealership’s marketing efforts and customer experience, 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 dealership 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. And in the meantime, check out this article discussing the main advantages for dealerships who outsource their contact centers and BDCs, “Why Should a Dealership Outsource Its Service BDC?”

automotive contact center chart

Finding the Right Contact Center for Your Dealership

admin | Contact Center |

Working with an outside contact center can help your dealership enhance its marketing efforts and grow as a business. That being said, finding the right contact center that fits your dealership’s needs can be challenging. In this article, we will discuss what a contact center is, its benefits, and how you can find a contact center that works for your dealership.

What is a Contact Center?

In the automotive industry, a contact center acts as the marketing wing for dealerships. It handles inbound calls and appointment scheduling, outbound call marketing campaigns, email marketing campaigns, interacting with customers via SMS and chat, and anything else related to the dealership’s marketing needs.

Benefits of Using a Contact Center

Using a contact center for your dealership’s marketing efforts has many advantages. The following are just a few of them, as outlined in our article about contact centers vs. call centers.

  • 21st Century Marketing: Contact centers are optimized for marketing in the 21st century. They use email, SMS, chat, and more, so they are ready to communicate with customers the way customers communicate in today’s world.
  • More Marketing and Communication Options: Because contact centers use so many different modes of communication, dealerships have numerous options for how to reach their customers, leading to lots of marketing possibilities.
  • Better Customer Experience: Being able to communicate with your customers in the ways that are comfortable for them provides the best customer experience possible. You may have some customers who prefer texting, some who prefer email, and some who prefer phone. With a contact center, you can accommodate your customers regardless of their preferences. Since customer experience is so crucial in the automotive industry, being able to communicate with your customers in the most efficient way possible is necessary for operating your dealership. And contact centers allow you to do just that.

How to Find the Right Contact Center

When searching for a contact center for your dealership, there are a few things you should keep in mind to ensure you get the best service possible. We recommend partnering with a contact center that possesses the following key characteristics:

  • Prioritizes Client Communication: Communication is key for anything, especially for something as important as your automotive marketing. When designing in-depth and targeted campaigns, it is important for communication to flow smoothly between your dealership and contact center. So, be sure to find a contact center that prioritizes clear and timely communication.
  • Excellent Listening Skills: Speaking of communication, one of the best ways to communicate effectively is to listen. Be sure to find a contact center with professionals who can listen to and understand your dealership’s specific goals and needs. Your partners should be able to listen to your needs, analyze them, and use their listening skills to help you develop campaigns that work for you.
  • Specializes in Automotive Marketing: We recommend finding a contact center that specializes in automotive marketing. While there are contact centers for just about any line of business, it would be beneficial as a dealership to partner with a firm that specializes in the automotive industry.
  • Prioritizes Agent Training: Robust agent training is a must for any contact center. After all, customer service can make or break your dealership. So, it is important to ensure your contact center has agents who are trained to provide the best service possible for your customers. Be sure to ask any prospective contact center about its training program to ensure its agents meet what you’re looking for.

Enhance Your Dealership with Customer Traac’s Contact Center

If you are looking for a contact center 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.

omnichannel marketing tablet

What is Omnichannel Marketing for a Contact Center?

admin | Contact Center | ,

Omnichannel marketing can help your dealership enhance its marketing efforts and reach more customers in a more effective manner. In this article, we will discuss what omnichannel marketing is, why your dealership should take advantage of it, and how outsourcing your marketing efforts can help you grow and take advantage of everything omnichannel marketing has to offer.

What is Omnichannel Marketing?

Omnichannel marketing refers to a personalized marketing experience revolving around the customer’s needs. In other words, with omnichannel marketing, a business sends its messages to the customer based on each customer’s actions and preferred modes of communication.

To illustrate, a business will use text messaging for customers who prefer text messaging, email for customers who prefer email, and so on. With omnichannel marketing, a company can use multiple modes of communication to reach each customer; and the combination of communication methods depends on each individual customer.

Why Should Your Dealership Use Omnichannel Marketing?

Using omnichannel marketing has many advantages for automotive dealerships. The following are just two of the most prominent benefits:

  • More Strategic Communication: Because you have multiple modes of communication at your disposal, you can be strategic with how you deliver your messages. And you can develop different strategies for each customer based on each customer’s specific needs and actions.
  • More Personalized Customer Experience: Omnichannel marketing allows customers to interact with your dealership in ways that are easiest for them, allowing for a more personalized and convenient customer experience.

Why Should You Outsource Your Automotive Marketing Efforts?

We recommend outsourcing your automotive marketing efforts to fully optimize your marketing and increase your ROI. The following are just some of the benefits your dealership will receive by outsourcing your marketing activities to a third-party automotive BDC:

  • Save Money: One of the biggest advantages of outsourcing your marketing efforts is the money you will save. If you manage your own campaigns, you must cover all of the costs associated with this operation, including:
    • Finding and hiring marketing experts
    • Conducting exhaustive company and marketing training
    • Salary, benefits, and other overhead costs for employees

On the other hand, if you outsource your email marketing, you only pay one cost. And while this exact cost will depend on many factors, it is never as high as the combination of the costs listed above.

  • Save Time: In addition to saving money, outsourcing your marketing efforts saves you valuable time. Finding and hiring employees, training them, and overseeing the extensive operations of a full-scale marketing campaign takes lots of time that could be better spent on selling cars or servicing customers at the dealership. We recommend working with a trained third-party BDC, so you can focus your time and energy on growing your business.
  • Work with Marketing Experts: We’re guessing that you specialize in selling and servicing cars, not automotive marketing. So why waste your time and money hiring and training new employees when you can work with professionals who are experts in automotive marketing? Moreover, working with an outside BDC allows you to run a campaign with experts who can view your goals and needs from a neutral standpoint, which helps eliminate internal biases that can negatively affect marketing efforts.

Enhance Your Dealership by Partnering with Customer Traac

If you would like to improve your dealership’s marketing efforts with omnichannel marketing, 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.

call center employee

Automotive Contact Center vs. Call Center — What’s The Difference?

admin | Call Center, Contact Center | ,

As a manager at an automotive dealership, you are probably looking for the best way to optimize your service department and customer experience. And while there are many ways you may be able to improve both aspects of your business, the solution you probably hear the most is outsourcing your scheduling and customer service to contact centers or call centers.

While working with both contact centers and call centers can be effective ways to improve your customer experience and service, it is important to know the difference between the two and what each offers. In this article, we will discuss what contact centers and call centers are, their differences, why contact centers are more effective, and how Customer Traac can help you with its automotive contact center.

What is a Call Center?

A call center is a centralized office that manages inbound and outbound calls for companies. Call centers focus solely on communicating via telephone, unlike contact centers, which focus on a variety of means of communication (more on this below). In the automotive industry, call centers focus on handling phone campaigns for dealerships.

What is a Contact Center?

While call centers only deal with phone campaigns, contact centers offer a vast amount of communications and marketing services. In the automotive industry, contact centers not only manage inbound and outbound calling campaigns, but they also communicate with customers via email marketing campaigns, SMS, chat, and many other communication tools. So, contact centers are optimized to communicate and run marketing campaigns that are on par with how customers communicate in the 21st century.

Why are Contact Centers Better than Call Centers?

Contact centers have many advantages over call centers. In fact, here are just a few of the most important benefits of using a contact center for your dealership:

  • 21st Century Marketing: As mentioned earlier, contact centers are optimized for marketing in the 21st century. While call centers only use phones, contact centers use email, SMS, chat, and more, so they are ready to communicate with customers the way customers communicate in today’s world.
  • More Marketing and Communication Options: Because contact centers use all these different modes of communication, dealerships have numerous options for how to reach their customers, leading to lots of marketing possibilities.
  • Better Customer Experience: Being able to communicate with your customers in the ways that are comfortable for them provides the best customer experience possible. You may have some customers who prefer texting, some who prefer email, and some who prefer phone. With a contact center, you can accommodate your customers regardless of their preferences. Since customer experience is so crucial in the automotive industry, being able to communicate with your customers in the most efficient way possible is necessary for operating your dealership. And contact centers allow you to do just that.

There are more advantages of contact centers than what we list above. For more information on contact centers and how they can improve your dealership’s marketing and customer experience, please visit our “Contact Centers” page.

Enhance Your Dealership with Customer Traac’s Contact Center

If you would like to improve your dealership’s marketing efforts and customer experience, 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.

call center metrics for dealerships help improve results

4 Critical Call Center Metrics for Dealerships

admin | Call Center, Contact Center, Customer Service | , , , ,

We have previously discussed the KPIs your dealership should track to measure success, but what about the call center? After all, they have their own metrics that indicate areas of opportunity as well as wins for your business. Of course, they should be mindful of to ensure customer retention, good sales numbers, and to improve upon processes. But how can they be tracked and evaluated? To get started on tracking call center metrics for dealerships, here are four key metrics to keep tabs on in your department.

Call Abandonment Rate

Dropped calls are something no contact center agent wants to have, but it does happen. It’s important to keep that percentage of abandoned or dropped calls to a minimum. The abandonment rate (or ARP) is the percentage of phone calls, generally inbound, made to a call center and abandoned by the customer before speaking to an agent. The general standard for a call center is to have a 2% or less abandoned call rate. If your call center is inching towards 5% or higher, that can be an issue and could lead to poor customer satisfaction and in turn, customer churn.

To figure out your abandon rate percentage, use this equation, which excludes any calls abandoned within 5 seconds, as those may be wrong numbers:

ARP = (# of calls offered – # of calls abandoned in 5 seconds – # of calls resolved) / (# of calls offered – # of calls abandoned in 5 seconds) x 100

Call abandonment rate can tie directly to wait times, being put on hold, and not being offered a callback. Here are some effective ways automotive dealership call centers can minimize abandoned calls:

  • Maintain a full staff, especially at busy call hours in the day.
  • Improve on-call messages.
  • Use a call back service that gives customers an option to wait, or receive a call back when their time in the queue comes up.
  • Reduce wait times, and answer within a few rings.
  • Incorporate after-hours answering services into your operation to make sure customers can choose to call back later and still reach someone.

Average Call Wait Time

There is a Golden Rule in the customer service industry that 80% of all calls should be answered within 20 seconds. We call this the 80/20 rule. While 20 seconds doesn’t seem like a lot of time, it can make a big difference to your customers!

Today’s consumers expect things to happen as fast as possible. With self-checkout lanes and same-day delivery via Amazon Prime, people don’t have to wait to get what they want anymore! HubSpot Research conducted a consumer survey that showed consumer patience wears out in under 10 minutes.

With a full staff receiving inbound calls and making outbound calls, this should be completely achievable. Introducing chat and email options for contacting your call center can also help alleviate some of that pressure, and it may be more suitable for managing high volumes.

Average Handle Time

Average handle time is another very important metric to track. If measured appropriately, it can help determine proper staffing needs so that a call center can run as efficiently as possible—without over or under hiring.

Average handle time (AHT) is the average duration of one phone transaction, starting from the customer’s initiation, including any hold time, talk time and post-call tasks, to the end of the call. To calculate you will add those numbers together, and divide by the total number of calls:

AHT = total talk time + total hold time + total post-call tasks / number of total calls

Customer Satisfaction

How does that old saying go… “The proof is in the pudding”? We don’t really know the origins of that phrase, but we know it means the effort put in should be reflected the outcome. By putting in a good effort towards customers, it should mean high customer satisfaction. This could be shown in reviews (both good or bad), or in a verbal confirmation that the call center did a good job.

If you notice reviews are going down, or more bad reviews are being left on your site, take action quickly. Customer satisfaction is one of the most telling metrics a call center can utilize for how they are doing overall. It can be an overarching issue with wait times, resolutions, agents, callbacks, etc… If your customers are telling you something is broken, it probably is. This is an opportunity to improve upon all of the above-mentioned metrics, which tie directly to a customer’s likelihood of coming back.

You should be diligently tracking and reviewing all of these call center metrics for dealerships quarterly. This data can help improve processes, find ways to make customers happier and more satisfied, and bring cost savings when you can staff and plan appropriately.

Customer Traac has been partnering with dealerships for over 30 years, improving customer satisfaction and growing profitability. To learn more about how Customer Traac can help your dealership, contact us today.

customer relationship management strategies that work for dealerships

Customer Relationship Management Strategies That Work

admin | Automotive BDC, Contact Center | , ,

Don’t wait any longer! Now’s the time to improve your CRM.

As Bob Dylan famously wrote, “The times they are-a-changin’, and they change faster and faster every year.” Thanks to advances in technology, economic conditions, and environmental concerns, consumer trends change over time. And if your customers are changing, your strategies to reach them should, too. Which is why using the same old customer relationship management strategies year over year can actually hurt your business. CRM, or client relationship management software, is a tool many businesses (including auto dealers) use not only as a database of current or potential customers but also a system to schedule communications and build relationships. These systems need to be on par with what customers expect out of businesses.

Evaluate What’s Working… and What’s Not

When considering changing up business processes, the best place to start is with data. Review everything you can get your hands on from website traffic to incoming phone calls, form submissions, emails, and floor ups. If you think the majority of your business starts as an internet lead, test the hypothesis. Discover the first point of contact for your sales last year, last quarter, and last month. Is it changing? Is that intentional?

Instead of guessing, obtain the data you need to make smart decisions—especially those that affect your team and bottom line. And pay attention to where your strategy could be falling short. It is equally important to identify those campaigns and channels that aren’t producing for your dealership as those that are performing well. Adding more resources to what’s working and taking a closer look at what’s not can help you re-imagine customer relationship management strategies that make an impact faster.

Pro Tip: If you’ve just implemented a new CRM, you may not have enough data to do this but it is worth considering every 6-12 months.

Identify Power Users and Challenge Them

In your review of what’s working, you’ll likely discover several team members who have higher than average usage rates of your CRM that the rest of the team. It’s a safe bet these team members have found their stride when it comes to the technology and the processes in place. Whether they are in your BDC, internet department, or on the floor, a great way to keep them engaged and your system evolving is to challenge them to develop new ideas on how to shorten the sales cycle, improve customer communications, or increase service traffic.

Additionally, these folks are great internal trainers for new hires or team members who are struggling to get up-to-speed with your system or processes. They are also uniquely positioned to identify areas where extra support might be needed. Perhaps they notice the ball gets dropped on important follow up strategies during busy weekends or that they can’t manage all the emails and phone calls for their customers on their own. Listen to their concerns and analyze the data. Should you hire more people? Should you look to outsource? Or do you need a back up plan only on those high-traffic days instead of an ongoing basis?

Pro Tip: These power users should come from every level and department. Their experience and insights will be more helpful than any outside resource.

Talk to Your Customers

What do you think is the highlight of your customer’s car buying experience? What could be improved? Ask your team. Write down the most popular answers. Now, ask your customers.

With customer expectations on the rise, you’re likely to discover “fast response” or a “helpful and courteous staff” to be ranked higher in feedback than the free bottled water or espresso machine in the showroom. Consider how you might be able to further improve response times while keeping team members from feeling overworked or stressed so they can continue to be easy to talk to and work with. What processes should be updated, created, or stopped to further enhance the customer experience?

Pro Tip: If your customers like your fast response or indicate it’s difficult to reach someone at the dealership, consider adding a partner into the mix who can always be available, even when your team is busy so the customer feels taken care of and appreciated.

Before venturing out and implementing improvements to your customer relationship management strategies, make sure employees fully grasp the concept of the improvements and why it’s important. The more specific you can be and the more employees understand how an improved CRM can positively improve their daily work and KPIs, the more successful they can be as employees, and the overall business. 

Customer Traac has a very clear vision of what it takes to be successful, and what it takes to implement a customer relationship management strategy that works. We stay up to date on industry trends and news, and love helping dealerships get or stay on track. If you would like to learn how we can partner with your team to improve the customer experience, reach out today. 

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