automotive bdc Archives - Customer Traac

Human Connection in the Digital Era

admin | Automotive BDC, Customer Service | automotive bdc, customer experience, customer satisfaction, dealership customer service, dealership satisfaction, human connection, outsource call center

Re-Incorporating People in Your Dealership’s Growth Plan

Technology continues to revolutionize every aspect of our lives and the automotive industry isn’t immune to its transformative powers. From cutting-edge CRM systems to virtual showrooms, the way we do business is evolving at breakneck speed. But among all these shiny new tools, there’s one timeless aspect that remains indispensable: human connection.

Customers today arrive at your dealership with an array of information gathered from their online research. They’ve already compared prices, read reviews, and scoped out their dream car’s specs. Customers are more informed and empowered than ever before, thanks to the wealth of information available at their fingertips.

So, where does that leave us? It might be tempting to rely solely on technology to streamline operations and enhance efficiency. And don’t get me wrong, technology has certainly revolutionized the way we work. CRM software tracks customer interactions, AI-powered chatbots handle initial inquiries, and predictive analytics help forecast inventory needs. It’s a brave new world out there, and we’re embracing it with open arms.

Your Dealership’s Secret Sauce

Your people, from the showroom receptionist to the advisors and technicians in the service drive, are the secret sauce that sets you apart from your competition. In a world dominated by screens and algorithms, there’s no substitute for genuine human connection. After all, behind every click, query, and purchase, there’s a customer with unique needs, desires, and emotions.

That’s why your staff is the face of your dealership, the frontline ambassadors who bring your brand to life. Technology might enhance their capabilities, but it can never replace their warmth, empathy, and expertise.

Take, for instance, the car-buying process. Sure, customers can browse inventory online, compare prices, and even complete financing applications from the comfort of their couch. But when it comes down to making the final decision, they crave reassurance and guidance from someone they trust. That’s where a knowledgeable salesperson can work wonders—answering questions, addressing concerns, and ultimately sealing the deal with a handshake and a smile.

Maybe that’s why it’s not surprising that in Cox Automotive’s annual Car Buyer Journey Stud y, consumers indicated improved satisfaction with the overall vehicle shopping and buying experience specifically as it relates to the test drive, vehicle delivery, and interaction with the sales team. Human interaction matters.

And let’s not forget about the service department, who keeps our customers on the road and coming back for more. With technology-enabled diagnostics and streamlined scheduling systems, we can optimize efficiency and minimize downtime. But when a customer’s car breaks down unexpectedly or they are trying to determine if they need to bring the car in now or wait for a later appointment, they need more than a quick fix. They need reassurance, transparency, and a guide to help them through the process.

That’s why every interaction matters. Whether it’s a floor up, a service appointment, or a follow-up call, each touchpoint shapes the customer’s experience and influences their perception of your dealership. And while technology can facilitate these interactions, it’s the human element that leaves the lasting impression.

Harness the Power of Human Interaction

Start by investing in your team. Train them to deliver exceptional service, empowering them to build genuine connections, and recognizing their efforts to go above and beyond for your customers. This will help foster a culture of empathy, integrity, and accountability, where every employee feels valued and appreciated for their contributions. Their connection to your dealership and their teams will deepen and will be felt by every customer they encounter, creating a culture that not only generates employee but also customer loyalty.

Next, leverage technology as a tool to enhance, not replace, the human touch. Use CRM systems to track customer preferences and personalize interactions. Consider implementing chatbots and virtual assistants to handle routine inquiries that free up your team to focus on more complex tasks. And above all, never lose sight of the fact that behind every byte of data, there’s a real person with real needs and real emotions.

Lastly, outsource those tasks you don’t want managed by technology but don’t have the bandwidth to manage internally either. For these, evaluate if your people have the time to handle these functions and consider whether they will need a back-up. For example, a receptionist has the time and training to answer your phones but when someone walks up to their desk with a question and the phone rings, do they have a back-up or are they asking the person in front of them to wait a moment? By utilizing a call center or automotive BDC manned by real people, you can ensure every call is answered, which can lead to more appointments, and increased profitability. Not to mention, you can rest assured that your customers are being taken care of by professionals who know your brand and care about your business.

As technology continues to revolutionize the automotive industry, the importance of human connection cannot be overstated. While digital tools and automation can improve efficiency and streamline operations, it’s the warmth and expertise of your internal and external teams that ultimately drives revenue and fosters customer loyalty. So, embrace technology, but never forget the power of a reassuring voice and a helping hand.

This article originally appeared in the March/April 2024 issue of Fixed Ops Magazin e.

About the Author:

Lynn Engebretsen is the Client Service Manager for Customer Traac®, an automotive call center and BDC that helps dealerships across the country improve performance and profitability. With over 20 years of experience with Customer Traac, her background includes telemarketing as well as call center management and implementation, including customer satisfaction index and sales calls. Lynn plays a key role in working with Customer Traac’s clients on a continual basis to assess needs and identify key strategies to ensure efficiency and ongoing success. She takes pride in her team’s ability to provide clients with prompt responses, resolutions, and exceptional customer service.

Drive More Revenue For Your Dealership

admin | Uncategorized | automotive bdc, automotive contact center, customer service, dealership customer service, service bdc

Three Areas to Focus on in 2024

In today’s rapidly evolving automotive landscape, exploring innovative tactics is paramount to staying ahead of the competition. Below are three areas to focus on and improve in 2024 that will help to drive more revenue for your dealership. Explore why embracing innovation is crucial and uncover expert advice designed to propel your business forward. Don’t miss out on this opportunity to unlock the full potential of your dealership and achieve unparalleled success in the year ahead.

Efficiency

Your dealership should work like a well-oiled machine. Every employee should be connected and know their role, how it affects others, and that their time and effort is meaningful. If all employees are on the same page, especially the salespeople, times between a customer walking in and out of the door could be cut drastically, which opens up more time, and thus more sales opportunities. But remember, efficiency improvements are not for sales alone! Your fixed operations team should also try some of these tactics to improve efficiency and drive more revenue for your dealership.

Managers should hold a daily check-in meeting to touch base with every team member at once, set priorities for the day, and encourage everyone to work as a cohesive unit.
Utilize a Business Development Center, like Customer Traac, to handle customer contact, appointment scheduling, and inquiries. It’s faster and more cost-effective than doing it in house, and your team can focus on the customers in front of them instead of trying to do two things at once.
Always be improving on sales tactics. Try role-playing scenarios to help team members learn how to handle any and every situation. Also, consider encouraging people in other dealership roles to learn sales techniques. You never know when that knowledge will be helpful or who your next salesperson of the month will be!
Make sure everyone knows and understands the the systems and software applications utilized by the dealership. When everyone is knowledgeable about the same things, it can help keep things from stalling out and putting pressure on others during the sales process.

Good Communication

Make certain your salespeople develop a great relationship with your customers right off the bat. People making a purchase decision as big as buying a car want to feel heard, appreciated, and respected. It’s very important to make that initial relationship from seller to buyer a friendly encounter. Listen to the customer first. Find out what they are looking for, what their lifestyle is, what their budget is, and how they want this vehicle to fit into their lives.

Buying a car can be a nerve-wracking experience and people are easily impressionable. It’s important to make customers feel comfortable. Introducing a Business Development Center (BDC) within that communication can help alleviate that time commitment for salespeople and management, and can pave the way for more effective communication between all parties.

Keep Customers

Retaining your customers is the best thing you can do to drive revenue for your dealership. To have a customer stay with you and keep coming back for more is a big win for any business. It also costs the dealership more time and money to obtain a new customer, than it is to keep a previous buyer. Kind of like the incentives, there are ways to make sure your customers maintain their relationship with you.

Offer support, knowledge, and fantastic customer service. People want to feel cared for and supported with a big financial decision.
Encourage future repairs through the dealership and pre-schedule services on their vehicle for the coming months. This can be made easier through an outsourced partner like Customer Traac that can manage appointment scheduling.
Implement a Business Development Center to help streamline incentives and programs that drive loyalty and revenue in the long run.
Improve client response times. Customers will likely go to another dealer if their calls and emails are not responded to in a timely manner. This includes hold times, too! So pay attention to your team’s availability throughout the day and busy times in particular, and consider whether or not a back up call center could improve customer satisfaction without impacting your employees’ priorities.
Maintain positive reviews! Be sure to kindly ask your customers to leave a review if they were happy with their experience at your dealership at the end of any transaction—from the service bay to the showroom floor.

For over 30 years, Customer Traac has helped our clients go above and beyond the competition and achieve ultimate success. We believe in great customer service and creating efficiency for dealership leaders and teams are the best ways to skyrocket your business and set you apart from the rest.

Contact us today for learn more. And, in the meantime, check out this article on how Customer Traac can help your service department.

How Customer Traac can help your Service Department

admin | Uncategorized | automotive appointment scheduling, automotive bdc

How can Customer Traac help your Service Department offer better quality service as well as leave customers with a lasting impression? We’ve compiled a list of our most frequently asked questions and answered them below.

Frequently Asked Questions

How can Customer Traac help my Service Department manage inbound calls?

Any time your company receives more calls than it can handle, Customer Traac will be there to help. We route inbound service calls to our highly trained, U.S.-based customer service agents. There, they will answer any questions your customers may have and even be able to schedule appointments on your behalf.

How can Customer Traac reduce call hold times for our customers?

Any time your dealership receives more inbound calls than it is capable of answering, you make your customers wait on the phone for you. With Customer Traac, we pick up the phone even when you can’t. Any time you are unable to answer the phone, we will route your customer to one of our courteous call agents. Consider hold times a thing of the past!

Can Customer Traac help schedule work evenly throughout the day?

One of the most frustrating aspects of running a service business is evenly distributing work throughout the day. With Customer Traac, our customer service agents will appropriately schedule your customers evenly throughout the day, at a time that works for them, and your business.

While running a successful fixed operations department is tough, it doesn’t have to be grueling. Take a moment to consider how an outsourced automotive BDC solution like Customer Traac could ease workloads, improve efficiencies, and increase revenue. If you’re ready to learn more, reach out to our team today. Or, if you would like more information, we recommend reading “3 Characteristics to Look for in an Automotive Service BDC.”

Contact Center Analytics: What Dealerships Need to Know

admin | Automotive BDC, Contact Center | automotive bdc, automotive contact center, call center, contact center, contact center analytics, data analytics

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?”

How to Create an Automotive BDC Phone Script

admin | Automotive BDC | automotive bdc, phone script

Training your BDC agents to effectively interact with your customers involves ensuring you have the right phone script for your agents to follow. Creating a comprehensive phone script can be challenging from a technical standpoint. Fortunately, though, there are many options for products you can buy that can help you create the right script for your dealership. We recommend checking out RingCentral as an example.

For this article, we won’t dive into the technical aspects of creating a phone script. Rather, we will focus on communication best-practices when it comes to creating a phone script that works for your agents and customers. Specifically, we will discuss three key tactics to keep in mind while creating your phone script. We will then discuss how outsourcing your automotive BDC can help you optimize your phone script and overall customer service operations.

Focus on Listening to the Customer: We recommend designing your phone script around the idea of getting as much information from the customer as you can. And this means ensuring the script is built around listening to the customer and allowing him or her to speak as much as possible. This way, you will ensure your agents can receive as much information about the problem as possible to best prepare your service advisors.

Allow Your Agents to Improvise: While having a set list of questions and script your agents must follow is important, it is equally as important to have room in your script for agents to improvise and use their best judgement to try to obtain the right information from your customers. After all, most problems your customers face are unique in at least some way, and it is important for your agents to identify and learn about these problems as much as possible so they can best prepare your service advisors for the appointment. Similarly, if your agents are running an outbound marketing campaign, it is important that your agents have the freedom to interact with your customers in a way that works for that specific interaction, seeing as each outbound calling interaction will be unique in some way.

Have a Call-to-Action: Having a call-to-action is crucial for the success of each call with your customer. In your script, be sure to have your agents ask your customers to “do something” after the call. This “something” could be coming in for an appointment, signing up for a service, signing up for a follow-up call, or so much more. The bottom line is that you don’t want the call to end with no next step clearly outlined by your agent and agreed upon by the customer.

Writing the right script for your agents and overseeing a customer service operation in general is challenging, time-consuming, and expensive. Because of this, we recommend partnering with a third-party BDC to enhance your operations and save you time and money. We discuss the main advantages for dealerships who outsource their BDC’s in our article titled, “Why Should a Dealership Outsource Its Service BDC?” Briefly, though, outsourcing your BDC will lead to more service appointments scheduled, a better customer experience, a strategically made phone script, more enhanced marketing and sales campaigns, and the saving of time and money.

If you are interested in speaking with someone about partnering with a third-party BDC, please read on below.

Outsource Your Service BDC with Customer Traac

If you would like to improve your dealership’s operations by outsourcing your service BDC, 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.

3 Characteristics to Look for in an Automotive Service BDC

admin | Automotive BDC | automotive bdc, automotive marketing tips

Partnering with a third-party automotive BDC is the right choice for dealerships who want to improve their operations and enhance their overall customer experience. In fact, we discuss the specific benefits of outsourcing your service BDC in our article titled, “Why Should a Dealership Outsource Its Service BDC?”

In this article, we’ll discuss three key characteristics to look for in an automotive BDC when choosing your third-party partner.

Wide Range of Services Offered: When partnering with a third-party BDC, be sure to partner with a company that offers a wide range of automotive marketing services. After all, dealership BDCs must be able to perform a wide variety of tasks, such as automotive marketing, appointment scheduling, customer service, outbound sales campaigns, and more. And it would be expensive and time consuming to hire a different company for each service. So, find a business development center that can handle everything.

Excellent Communication: Good communication is crucial for the success of any company, especially in the automotive industry. So, be sure to find a BDC that a) has agents who are expert communicators with customers and b) has leadership that is able to effectively communicate with your dealership. When you meet with prospective BDC partners, be sure to take notes on how they communicate with you, so you can make sure you choose a partner that fits your business’s communication style.

In-Depth Agent Training Program: As you already know, providing exceptional customer service is one of the keys to running a successful dealership. Because of this, you better be sure that the BDC you hire is able to provide the best customer support possible. And one of the best ways to ensure this is the case is to examine the agent training programs of each prospective BDC partner. Make sure that whoever you hire to run your BDC operations has a proper training regimen that fits your dealership’s business style, so you can ensure that the agents at this BDC will be as prepared as possible to interact with your customers.

Outsource Your Service BDC with Customer Traac

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

Why should a dealership outsource service BDC?

admin | Automotive BDC | automotive bdc, outsource BDC, service bdc

The decision to outsource service BDC function offers numerous advantages for your dealership, significantly boosting your ROI. Here are some of the key benefits:

More Service Appointments Scheduled

Your service advisors are busy assisting customers, so they do not have time to answer each call and schedule appointments. And each missed call in your service department is a missed potential customer. Outsourcing your service BDC will ensure calls are answered by trained customer service professionals who can schedule more business for your dealership.

Better Customer Service

Customer service is crucial for any dealership, so it’s important your customers are treated to an exceptional customer experience. And while your service advisors may be excellent employees and communicators, as mentioned earlier, they are probably so busy working with customers on site that they cannot dedicate the time necessary to deliver a good customer experience over the phone. They may not even be able to answer the phone.

Outsourcing your service BDC will ensure that highly trained and experienced agents deliver each customer an exceptional customer experience over the phone. Your customers will get an excellent impression of your dealership.

Enhance Your Marketing and Sales Campaigns

Running marketing and sales campaigns for your service department time-consuming, stressful, and expensive. It is also difficult to do if you are not a seasoned marketer or salesperson. Outsourcing your service BDC allows you to partner with third-party and objective professionals who are experts in automotive marketing. Third-party service BDCs can run integrated marketing and sales campaigns tailored to meet the specific needs of a dealership, while also working on upselling customers who call to schedule appointments. They have the resources most dealerships don’t have on their own to run large scale campaigns.

Save Time and Money

Outsourcing your service BDC will not only save your service department the time and hassle of managing appointment scheduling and marketing campaigns, but it will also save your dealership money. If you don’t outsource your service marketing efforts, you will need to pay the costs of hiring, training, and managing a full-time team of marketers and customer service employees. Outsourcing your operations to a trusted third-party is much less expensive and creates more ROI for your dealership.

Outsource Your Service BDC with Customer Traac

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 fill out our contact form to learn more.

Dealership Customer Service in a Post-Covid World

admin | Customer Service | automotive bdc, customer service

As we enter the post-Covid world, we must consider the numerous business-related changes from the Covid era that have a good chance of sticking around. In addition to more remote and digital work, there are a few key changes in the automotive industry that we anticipate will have a substantial impact on how dealerships operate and interact with customers.

In this article, we will discuss two of the most important changes to how dealerships will have to interact with customers in the post-Covid era. We will then discuss how you can receive help with your customer service by partnering with a third-party BDC.

More Pre-Sales and Pre-Service Interaction

During Covid, customers learned how to get most of the information they need about buying or servicing a vehicle either online or over the phone. And after interacting with dealerships in this manner for more than a year and enjoying the convenience of rarely (if ever) having to step foot into the dealership, we can expect customers to continue to want to virtually interact with your business whenever possible.

This means that as a dealership, you must prioritize the virtual and over-the-phone customer experience far more than you did before Covid. This means investing more time and money in website design, virtual agent training, and other phone and Internet-related services. It also means that being able to quickly answer more calls as they come in is more important than ever.

Manage Shorter Customer Attention Spans

Because Covid drove your customers’ lives online, your customers are now exposed to thousands more messages each day. After all, the more one lives online, the more one sees and hears messages on social media and the Web in general.

This increase in message exposure is usually correlated with a decrease in patience, as the human brain can only spend so long absorbing a message when it is exposed to thousands more each day. Unfortunately, this also means that as a dealership, you have less time and space to capture the attention of your customers.

Partner with a Third-Party BDC to Adjust to a Post-Covid World

While as a dealership, you must adjust to these changes in ways that work for you, we recommend partnering with a third-party automotive BDC to give your customers the experience they seek. In fact, partnering with an automotive BDC will help improve pre-sales and pre-service interactions with customers, while also helping to create messaging and marketing campaigns adjusted to capture your customers’ shorter attention spans. Here’s how:

Answering More Calls: Third-party BDCs are set up to handle an extraordinary call volume and answer nearly all incoming calls for dealerships as soon as the phone rings. Trained agents then help set up appointments, answer customers’ questions, and ensure they get everything they need. Answering the phone on time and in a professional manner leads to a great customer experience and helps improve the pre-sales and pre-service customer experience. It also ensures customers get what they need right away, instead of having to wait on hold or be denied the opportunity to speak with someone (remember the short attention spans discussed earlier).

Creating Strategic Marketing Campaigns: Third-party BDCs specialize in creating targeted marketing campaigns that immediately grab the attention of customers. These campaigns are crucial in a post-Covid world that involves less in-person interaction and more message exposure.

Mastering Customer Interaction: Third-party BDCs have the ability to communicate with all customers in a timely and effective manner. They use email, text, messaging, phone, and other methods of communication to reach customers in ways that work for them. Agents are then trained to communicate effectively and drive customers to your dealership.

Enhance Your Dealership’s Customer Service by Partnering with Customer Traac

If you would like to improve your dealership’s customer service by outsourcing your BDC, 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.

How to Hire the Best Automotive BDC Representatives

admin | Automotive BDC | automotive bdc, hire BDC agents

As a manager or owner of a dealership, you know that customer service can make or break the success of your business. And arguably the most important aspect of building a successful customer service operation is hiring and working with the right people.

In this article, we will discuss what to keep in mind while hiring agents for your automotive BDC, as well as why outsourcing your BDC to a third party could be the best way to ensure you have the right people handling your customer service.

Tips for Hiring the Best Automotive BDC Agents

While interviewing and hiring your automotive BDC agents, we recommend looking for professionals who possess and prioritize the following qualities and values:

Excellent Communication: Good communication is key for any aspect of business, especially for running an effective customer service operation. Since your BDC agents will be communicating with dozens of customers every day, they must prioritize exceptional communication skills above all else. Moreover, as your BDC agents will be the first point of contact for many of your customers, they must make a good impression, further showing that their communication skills must be excellent.

Welcoming Phone Personality: Because your BDC agents will be the first point of contact for many potential customers, they must be able to welcome customers into your dealership. So, they must give off a welcoming and warm personality while communicating over the phone. Please do not confuse this, though, with the need to possess an extroverted personality. In fact, introverts bring many strengths to the table when it comes to customer service. All this means is that your BDC agents must have the communication skills to be able to sound warm and welcoming throughout the customer experience.

Prioritize Listening to Customers: The first step to being a good communicator and providing exceptional customer service is to be able to listen to your customers’ needs. So, it is important that the BDC agents you hire possess exceptional listening skills. They must be able to listen to your customers, analyze their problems based on their specific needs, and provide solutions that are tailored to each customer.

Company Loyalty: Customer service roles at automotive BDCs can have high turnover if you aren’t careful in your hiring process. And having to constantly hire and train new people is expensive, time consuming, and annoying. So, try to find employees who possess loyalty and can show that there is a good chance they will stay with you for a long time. While loyalty can be difficult to measure in a candidate, there are a few things you can look for. For example, has the candidate been floating from job to job over the past few years, or has he or she been steady at one job? Why is the candidate leaving his or her past position? What are the candidate’s career aspirations? Is he or she looking to grow within a single company?

Outsource Your Automotive BDC to Ensure High-Quality Agents

If you follow the tips discussed above, you will be more likely to find agents that can sustain your BDC as a successful operation. However, finding the right agents and managing this type of operation can be expensive and take your time away from other aspects of your dealership. Because of this, the best way to maintain a high-quality BDC with exceptional agents may be to outsource your BDC to a third party.

We discuss the many advantages of outsourcing your automotive BDC in our article titled, “How to Improve Your Automotive BDC.” In addition to the benefits discussed in that article, outsourced BDCs are able to focus their time and energy on hiring and training the best agents for the job, meaning they are able to provide the best customer service for your dealership. Moreover, third-party BDCs have the resources available to use their agents’ skills to run multifaceted marketing campaigns that can help your dealership grow and increase its ROI.

In sum, outsourcing your BDC could save you time and money, while also allowing you to expand your marketing operations with trained and experienced automotive BDC agents.

Enhance Your Automotive BDC by Partnering with Customer Traac

If you are in need of an automotive 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.

Automotive BDC Training Best-Practices

admin | Automotive BDC | automotive bdc, dealership customer service

As a manager at an automotive dealership, you’re constantly thinking about how to best train your employees and/or prepare them to serve your customers. After all, effective customer service can make or break your dealership’s ROI.

And if you operate your own internal business developer center, there are a few things you should keep in mind to ensure your agents provide the best customer service possible. Read on to learn some automotive BDC training best-practices, so you make sure your agents serve your customers in the best way possible. We will also discuss why outsourcing your BDC to a third party may be your best option for minimizing your costs and providing excellent customer service.

Tips for Automotive BDC Training

If you’re managing an automotive BDC at your dealership, we recommend taking into account the following:

Learn Your Customers: As mentioned above, the success of your dealership is hugely impacted by your customer service. And the first step to providing the best customer service is to learn everything you can about your customers. So, while training your BDC agents, be sure to focus on the demographics and psychographics of your customers so your agents are as prepared as possible to serve them well.

Teach Patience: As you know, customers can be difficult to deal with at times, but you still need them to be happy and to want to continue to buy your products and services. As difficult as customer service can be, your agents must be able to treat your customers with respect and satisfy their needs. And this starts by mastering patience.

Teach Confidence: While your agents must be patient with your customers, they must also be strong and authoritative. In other words, they must be able to say “no” when necessary and be confident in their conversations with customers. While satisfying your customers is important, knowing how to avoid being pushed around by rude customers is crucial as well, especially for employee morale.

Outsource Your Automotive BDC

Effectively training your BDC agents and running a business development center can be difficult and expensive, so we recommend looking into outsourcing your BDC operations altogether. Outsourced BDCs consist of trained and experienced customer service representatives that specialize in providing an exceptional customer experience in the automotive industry. Third-party business development centers specialize in the following elements that help enhance dealerships’ customer service:

Answering nearly all inbound phone calls, so customers do not wait on hold or have trouble getting in touch with you
Interacting with customers in a friendly and professional manner
Communicating with customers on a variety of platforms, including phone, email, SMS, chat, and more.
Going above and beyond to make sure your customers are happy

In addition to providing excellent customer service and streamlining dealership operations, outsourcing your BDC saves money, as it eliminates the costs associated with hiring and training call center agents, as well as the costs of operating a full-scale in-house BDC.

Enhance Your Dealership by Partnering with Customer Traac

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