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Outsourcing Your Business Development Center: Pros & Cons

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Are you thinking about outsourcing your Business Development Center? Needless to say, outsourced business development has strong pros, as well as some potential drawbacks you should be aware of. That’s why we’ve curated a list of “pros and cons” to help you decide what’s best for you and your dealership.

Pros

Business Control Overhead

Outsourcing a BDC means you are hiring their team, for a contract, and a flat rate. A dealership’s labor expense can be one of their highest after accounting for taxes, vacation, bonuses, insurance, office space, personnel support, office supplies—you name it! Not to mention the time and money allocated to recruit, train, and retain employees. By outsourcing, you are able to control overhead and maintain a steadfast budget. Any changes to their internal structure or team is not on the dealership, and your service agreement remains the same.

Access Greater Talent For Your Business

An in-house BDC is limited to a few people, given space and salary requirements. Companies like Customer Traac, who focus on customer service for dealerships, are going to have dozens of people dedicated to your cause, whose talent and expertise goes leaps and bounds beyond the capabilities of hiring internally. You will always have more than one person focusing on your business and providing top tier customer service.

Don’t Have to Expand Business Space

Business Development Departments can produce a lot of noise—making phone calls, receiving phone calls, etc. and would require their own space. We all know moving can be a hassle, especially in an office setting. There is no need to make room for offices, or desks when outsourcing your BDC.

Streamlining Customer Service

Having a team devoted 100% to the customer service of your dealership not only streamlines customer service, but improves it tenfold. Call wait times will decrease, appointment scheduling will be proactive and timely, and service managers and other employees can focus on what they do best.

Cons

BDC Outsourcing Is Expensive

Although a BDC can save you money by decreasing overhead costs, it doesn’t mean it’s cheap. A contract with a business development center can depend on a number of things, especially for those that charge incentive fees. Watch out for BDCs looking for extra compensation based on sales. The cost-effectiveness of the service can sometimes waver, so choose your BDC wisely. And remember, a BDC should be a revenue center, not a cost center.

Employees Outside of Your Company

You may not be able to take part in the selection process of the people dealing with your customers and representing your brand. This means putting your trust in people who your dealership didn’t hire directly. It’s important to develop a good relationship with your BDC managers right off the bat, and feel comfortable utilizing their employees for your services. This can be difficult (but not impossible) for some managers.

Negative Impact on Company Culture

Having members of your team outside the organization could impact company culture by not being able to get to know the outsourced team. An in-house team can focus on getting to know each other on a more intimate level. However, through regular communication and account check-ins with your outsourced BDC, you can develop a relationship built on trust that rivals those of colleagues you see every day.

In Conclusion…

Outsourcing your to a BDC might make you worry about communicating with the team. But there is a team of people you can communicate with via email or phone.

Customer Traac ensures there are no communication snags. By keeping one point of contact, you can streamline communication with your BDC. Which saves you time and increases our effectiveness. That’s how we help dealerships focus on what they do best, and they trust us to do the same.

Learn more about Customer Traac’s automotive BDC solutions today.

How Phone Presence Can Increase Customer Satisfaction and Retention

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In a time where we have access to fast, endless information at our fingertips at any given moment, people don’t have time to waste. People’s expectations are high for how information is shared and received. When it comes to user experience over the phone, people want efficiency and ease. They also want to feel cared for. The #1 way a company can prove they care is by having kind and quick responses to customers – giving them a resolution in a matter of minutes.

So how exactly can phone presence improve customer satisfaction and keep them coming back for more?

Long Waits and Dropped Calls Reduce Customer Satisfaction

How many times have you had a friend or family member tell you about a terrible customer service experience they had? Probably a lot. People tend to share bad experiences more than good when it comes to customer service. They want to help save people from having a similar bad experience.

Having a call center that puts people on hold right away, or drops calls, is fueling that negative fire and customers won’t come back. A survey conducted by Velaro showed that most people are not willing to wait on hold for even a minute, if that. The infographic to the right shows that a whopping 90% of people surveyed had a limit to how long they would wait. In fact, 32.3% said they wouldn’t wait at all. If they receive no answer or get put on hold they would hang up. These numbers are huge and that’s bad news for customer retention.

Making sure every call is picked up is the first step. If you absolutely have to put someone on hold, ask them kindly first, and if they say no try to resolve their problem as quickly as possible. Offering a call-back service is something people are willing to accept. This can be done with a person, or there are automated services that will give that option in the menu as well. Having a well-organized plan as well can help avoid long wait times, and dropped calls.

Quickly Converting Calls to Appointments Boosts Customer Satisfaction

A customer wants to get all their issues resolved in one fell swoop. Treating a customer service call as an opportunity for future appointments and sales is the way to achieve customer retention. In the case of service calls at dealerships, when a customer calls in, it’s possible to schedule out their maintenance a full year in advance. Not only does this free up future calls, but the customer feels cared for, and that they received great service. They know they don’t have to follow-up in the future, or receive any calls for appointment reminders. Everything is done then and there.

A customer calling in with one question, may not actually know everything they need. It is the job of the agent to listen and resolve a problem but also educate and leave the customer feeling more informed than when they called. This gives the opportunity to upsell, schedule future times, offering call back service and text reminders.

When Customers Feel Cared For, Their Satisfaction Goes Up

There is one thing to simply help a customer resolve the issue they had, it’s another to curate the conversation in a way that wows the customer. Like many of us, I’m sure when we are setting up to call a company’s customer service team, we may not be overly excited. There’s no guarantee good service will be received, so expectations may be pretty low if it’s their first call. Take advantage of those expectations and blow them out of the water.

A customer wants to feel cared for, which means going above and beyond a simple Q & A. Offer more information, more knowledge, ask if they know about all the services offered. Some of this may seem obvious, but it’s important to pivot a way of thinking towards the customer being tended to beyond the scope of the call, and not just being nice and helpful to them.

Improving Customer Satisfaction Requires Keeping Up with a Fast-Paced World

The infographic at the start of this article is a few years old, and though the basic stats are still very relevant, time and technology continue to speed up. More and more companies offer chat or text options for customer service. This is pretty in line with how people talk less on the phone, and more than ever via text or social media. With everything being accessible super quickly, and right from our phones, customer service speeds are expected to be just as fast and just as efficient. It’s crucial to be able to face the fact that people don’t want to waste time, as it shows by so many people not willing to be put on hold.

Having solid customer service means getting to the point, answering the question, informing the customer and having that entire call be under 5 minutes flat. Offering text reminders, and call-back service rather than being put on hold are going to become the norm and will be the minimum expectation people have in all future correspondence. Keep it short and sweet!

Service success, it begins with a call.

Frequently Asked Questions:

Why does having a strong phone presence improve customer satisfaction?

As a customer, there’s nothing worse than getting put on hold when you need to get in touch with a business. Simply put, it says ‘We don’t have time for you.’ When someone answers the phone with a happy and helpful attitude, it communicates exactly the opposite. Call centers help express the value your customers deserve when you don have the time.

What are the negative effects of not having a good call center?

Hiring a call center that provides inadequate service can cause numerous problems for your dealership. The whole point of hiring a call center is to improve your customer service, but a bad call center can actually make it worse, and damage your reputation with customers by dropping calls, and not adequately satisfying caller intent.

Why should dealerships care about having a strong phone presence?

For as many spam calls dealerships receive, there are still numerous, ready-to-buy customers who call in on a regular basis. Without a strong phone presence, those customers would be put on hold, or dropped, costing your dealership big money over time. A strong phone presence nurtures prospective customers into closed business.

Automotive Call Center Benefits Your Dealership Can Leverage

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Walk into the service drive of a traditionally-modeled shop and, rather than hearing the quiet hum of customers and Service Advisors interacting, you hear phones—the sound of phones ringing and ringing, interrupting the Advisors as they try to work with the customers in the drive. This is where automotive call center benefits can make all the difference.

First Hand Call Center Experience

“My phones would ring off the hook in the morning. My service team was overwhelmed,” says Jim Bloedel, former Service Director of a large Milwaukee-area auto dealership. “Calls came in four, five, and six at a time when it was busy.” The challenge isn’t so much the noise, but what the unrelenting ringing represents. On the other end of each call is a prospective customer who needs Service work, often, as soon as possible. From the dealer’s perspective, each call has the potential to serve a customer, book a repair, sell a part, upsell a promotion, and enhance a customer’s loyalty. But those ringing phones come with a cost.

They divide the Service Advisor’s attention between the customers in the shop and the customers on the phone. This often compromises both customer face-time and the ability to efficiently schedule Service appointments. “I would routinely hear Service Advisors say, ‘Hey, my schedule is full,’” Bloedel recalls. So he was riveted when he attended a presentation that featured the practice of outsourcing a dealership’s BDC function.

The concept has since spread coast to coast, resulting in what can be characterized as a second group of dealerships: those whose Service drives are distinctly phone-ring-free.

Sold on the concept, Bloedel decided to outsource his BDC. “Now, I’m suddenly busy all day. There’s no mad rush in the morning and the phones aren’t ringing off the hook, so my guys have time to talk to my customers.”

Bloedel engaged Customer Traac to receive and manage incoming customer calls for Service and Parts and to schedule customer repairs directly on the dealership’s Service appointment calendar. In short order, the dealership noticed that available slots, from open to close, weekdays and weekends, were efficiently filling. And customers reported higher satisfaction with the service they received, too.

Each call has the potential to serve a customer, book an appointment, sell parts, upsell a promotion, and enhance a customer’s loyalty.

Reaping The Benefits Of An Experienced Automotive Call Center

“Within 60 days we found an increase in repair sales. My customer satisfaction level went up because my people had more quality time to spend with our guests,” he says. “Here’s the big thing—my R.O. counts started to go up and I started to get more appointments mid-afternoon and Saturday because I’d taken control of my schedule away from my Service Advisors.”

The value of an outsourced BDC, coupled with Customer Traac’s approach to customer service, convinced Bloedel to join the company as a sales representative. During his tenure, increased dealership demand is reflected in the numbers: Customer Traac continued to expand its client base, serving dealerships across the country from its roots in Minnesota and Wisconsin.

There’s always risk in transferring an internal company function to an outside organization. However technology and training enable outsourced BDCs to operate seamlessly on behalf of their dealer clients.

In an outsourced arrangement, when a customer calls your Service Department, the call will initially be picked up by your representative, who then forwards the call to the outsourced call center. Alternatively, an auto-attendant can route calls directly to the call center, depending on the dealership’s preference.

By syncing up with your in-house scheduling and customer databases, the outsourced Service Representative has immediate access to everything they need to serve both you and your customer: available slots on your Service calendar (based on the nature of the needed repair); an estimated price (you can choose whether to provide this information on the initial call); the maintenance history of the caller’s vehicle; as well as any promotions your dealership is offering at the time of the call.

How Our Automotive Call Center Gets Results

The call center representative will ask for the customer’s name and phone number, allowing the representative to immediately find that customer’s information in your database. If it’s a new customer, we can add them to the system. That’s huge for the dealership, to have updated information. The conversation can then focus on the customer’s needs and schedule.

Representatives are trained to schedule the next available appointment for the customer, even if it’s late that same day or on the weekend. No longer does the Service Manager or Advisor control the schedule based on their (or the technicians’) personal needs.

From the customer’s standpoint, the person on the other end of the phone is a dealership representative with the job of getting their vehicle booked for Service and finished.

From the dealer’s perspective, the value proposition is simple: Does outsourcing its BDC result in a net financial gain and a better customer experience? Operationally, outsourcing a BDC can significantly reduce fixed labor costs and overhead while bringing modern-day efficiencies into a dealership’s Service drive. And if using an outsourced BDC nets just one additional appointment per day, he says, the service pays for itself each month.

Agents have access to your store’s Service schedule, as well as customers’ vehicle data, enabling them to fill your schedule and maximize shop loading. The upside, depending on how the Service team chooses to use its newfound time freedom, can be significant.

“When we take the pressure of the phone away from the service advisor, we give them back two to four hours of talk time every day,” Bloedel says. “This is time that can be used to improve the sales process, the greeting, the walk-around, the review, and service recommendations, all leading to increased revenue opportunities.”

An outsourced BDC can also contract with a dealership’s internal BDC to offer “backstop coverage”, automatically handling overflow calls that the internal BDC is unable to field. Having this coverage assures that you can handle rush periods, like that weekly Monday morning barrage of calls, knowing that you won’t drop calls or miss Service opportunities.

Years Of Call Center Experience, Backing Your Hard-Working Dealership

Three years ago, Berlin City Honda Nissan of Portland, Maine outsourced its BDC to Customer Traac, effectively routing approximately two thousand customer phone calls from its Service Department per month. “We wanted to make it a very easy customer experience,” says Nick Sansone, the dealership’s Service Director. “And when you have a call center that communicates as effectively and efficiently as Customer Traac has done for us, it certainly builds the value of who we are as an organization. We don’t feel like the Advisors have a phone in their ear the whole time. They’re not rushed. It lends more time for them to have that good one-on-one time with each customer.”

Ultimately, it’s about having the full force of a call center team to cover and consummate customer calls that could have otherwise been dropped. “When dropped calls are minimized, it keeps customers from falling through the cracks,” he says. “More appointments is what drives additional sales.”

It’s one sales dynamic in which quietude on-site belies a bustling business.

Frequently Asked Questions:

What is the main benefit a dealership would get from hiring a call center?

By far the biggest benefit any dealership will get from hiring a call center is consistent, high-quality call service. When large quantities of calls start coming in it can be difficult to give each call the attention it deserves, especially when multiple come in at once. A Call center makes sure each customer gets the attention they deserve.

What are the risks involved with outsourcing a call center?

Hiring a call center does come with its risks, which makes it incredibly important you vet your call center before hiring them. Low-quality call centers are much more likely to drop calls or provide inadequate service while on the phone with your customer. Make sure you check customer reviews before hiring a call center.

How long will it take to get positive results from hiring a call center?

Hiring a call center can help lift much of the call-heavy burden of running a dealership within the first month of getting set up. As time goes on, processes should improve, allowing call centers to provide an even larger benefit to their respective dealerships. If you’re a dealership and think you need call support, we strongly recommend looking into hiring a call center.

Originally written by:
Jon Stone is a writer and digital communicator based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, whose work focuses on health care, manufacturing, and auto industry sectors.

This article was originally published in Fixed Ops Magazine.

Updated March 8, 2024.